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REPUTATIONS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

NOVELS 

MARGOT'S PROGRESS 

THE FORTUNE 

THE BLACK CURTAIN 
Etc., Etc. 

PLAY 

THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM 
A Play in Four Acts 



REPUTATIONS 

ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 



BY 



DOUGLAS GOLDRING 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS SELTZER 

1920 



* 






Printed in Great Britain by 
Richard Clay <St Sons, Limited, 

BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1, 
AND BUNCAY. SUFi-'OI.K. 



'Irys? 



TO 

MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. JAMES ELROY FLECKER : AN APPRECIATION 
AND SOME PERSONAL MEMORIES . 

II. THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS — COMPTON 
MACKENZIE — HUGH WALPOLE — GILBERT 
CANNAN 

III. THE LATER WORK OF D. H. LAWRENCE 

IV. MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 
V. THE WAR AND THE POETS 

VI. AN OUTBURST ON GISSING 



VII. THE AUTHOR OF " TARR " 



VIII. THE GORDON SELFRIDGE OF ENGLISH 
LETTERS ..... 



IX. REDDING " ON W r INES " 



X. CLEVER NOVELS 

xi. 1855 

XII. LOW TASTES . 

XIII. LOOKING BACK 



37 

65 

79 

99 

123 

133 

145 
157 
169 
183 
197 
211 



vii 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 



Of the many young poets who died or were 
killed during the European War, none perhaps has 
proved a greater loss to English letters than James 
Elroy Flecker. By his death in Switzerland of 
consumption at the age of thirty England was 
deprived of a poet who loved her passionately, 
whose work will endure long into the days of peace, 
whose reputation is likely to go on increasing, 
rather than to wane. At present his poetry is 
still, I think, not as familiar as it deserves to be, 
though the number of his admirers is steadily 
growing both in England and in America. Flecker 
was never the idol of any particular set during his 
lifetime, and since his death very little has been 
written about his personality as it appeared to 
those who knew him well. The memories of one 
who valued his friendship and was closely associated 
with him during his literary life may thus be 
not unworthy of record. 

My first clear recollection of James Flecker is 

3 



4 REPUTATIONS 

of an evening spent with him in a Bloomsbury 
lodging-house, in the early summer of 1907. He 
had not long come down from Oxford, and had 
recently, I think, been schoolmastering in Hamp- 
stead. 

The house, which was in Torrington Square, on 
the left-hand side as you walked towards the 
Irvingite Church, seemed dark and half-deserted 
on my arrival, and its cavernous hall was illuminated 
only by one flickering gas-jet, half-way up the 
stairs. Flecker' s sitting-room was at the back, on 
the second floor, and on the night of my visit it 
was in an extraordinary state of chaos, reminding 
one of nothing so much as the inner parlour of a 
second-hand bookseller's shop. Books and papers 
lay about everywhere, heaped together in hopeless 
confusion. A wave of paper-covered volumes 
seemed to have broken over the table and spent 
itself on the floor. More piles of books stood 
in all the corners and on the chimney-piece; 
the book- cases overflowed. Pictures were stacked 
against the skirting-board or lay face downwards 
on the carpet. A typewriter somewhere dis- 
entangled itself from amidst piles of manuscript. 
And jumbled up with French, Spanish and Italian 
novels, foreign illustrated papers and sumptuous 
editions of the Greek and Latin poets, were liqueur 
bottles, glasses, copies of " L'Assiette au Beurre," 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 5 

and packets of caporal cigarettes. A withering 
glare of unshaded incandescent gas poured down on 
all this confusion, in the midst of which — tall and 
lean, with black hair and heavy eyebrows — stalked 
the unforgettable figure. 

The details of what took place that evening 
remain with peculiar distinctness in my memory, 
though it was not, of course, my first meeting with 
Flecker. This must have been in a drawing-room 
in Chelsea, for I did not know him as an under- 
graduate except by repute. His fame at Oxford 
for the kind of brilliance then in vogue was astonish- 
ing, his " japes " were repeated everywhere, and 
long before I met him I had heard so much about 
his genius that I was filled with suspicions, deter- 
mined at all costs not to be unduly impressed ! 
(In those days I had my own gods and was prepared 
to find other people's inferior.) 

Any prejudices with which I may have arrived 
at Flecker' s rooms were, however, very soon dis- 
persed. Never shall I forget the way he talked ! 
The window of the room was wide open at the 
bottom, framing a square of dark blue night; 
and through it, as an undertone to his conversation, 
came the faint, thrilling roar of London. He was 
tremendously excited— in an extraordinary mood of 
elation. He was excited about his first book of 
poems, which was shortly to be published by Mr. 



6 REPUTATIONS 

Elkin Mathews, excited about his novel, The King 
of Alsander, of which the opening chapters had just 
been typed; and, above all, excited (so it seemed) 
by the sheer joy of being alive, of having the world 
in front of him. I remember that he read me the 
two poems, " Ideal " and " The Town without a 
Market," which I fancy he had just completed; 
and I can hear him now repeating the lines — 

" When all my gentle friends had gone 
I wandered in the night alone : 
Beneath the green electric glare 
I saw men pass with hearts of stone ; 
Yet still I heard them everywhere, 
Those golden voices of the air : 
'Friend, we will go to hell with thee.' ..." 

in his gentle, rather high-pitched, enthusiastic 

voice, with its latent suggestion of melancholy. 

And after this he read the first two chapters of 

The King of Alsander, and never before, I thought, 

had work of such epoch-making brilliance been 

written. (Alas, when I read the poor old " King " 

in his entirety, seven years later, it was a blow to 

find how Time had robbed him of his glamour.) 

Then he talked of his approaching visit to France, 

with a friend in the Foreign Office. They were 

off to plunge into some kind of rising among the 

vignerons of the Bordeaux district, where at that 

time Catholicism was in conflict with the Republic. 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 7 

Flecker produced the rigolo which he was taking 
with him; its barrel glinted in the gaslight. 
Somehow he made the adventure of being young 
almost unimaginably thrilling. At that time I 
was an ardent Francophile, and Flecker seemed 
to have done all the things which I (at twenty) 
was pining to do myself. It appeared that he 
knew Paris almost as well as London; had been 
to all the cabarets of Montmartre and the Latin 
quarter; was familiar with Steinlen's work (not 
so hackneyed in those far-off days), of which he had 
many reproductions ; and could hum all the latest 
songs of Bruant, Lucien Boyer or Marinier. 

Flecker was essentially of the fine flower of the 
English Public School and University system; he 
was entirely absorbed in his art and in the loveliness 
of a world seen through the eyes of a scholar and 
a poet. Never before or since have I encountered 
any one with such a rapturous, with such an 
intoxicating joy of living. Our talk soon came back 
to poetry, to his own poems; and as I listened, 
to be a poet seemed the most wonderful thing 
in a world full of the maddest, most delicious 
possibilities. . . . 

That was one aspect of Flecker; there was 
another. Behind his delight in life could be de- 
tected, even then, an under-note of sadness. When 
he wrote of himself as " the lean and swarthy poet 



8 REPUTATIONS 

of despair n it was probably a joke — it was still 
the fashion to be despairing in those days — but, 
like most jokes worth making, there was a 
flavour of truth in it. It is difficult to avoid the 
thought that some of the extraordinary rapture 
with which he looked on the world was due to a 
premonition that he was not long to inhabit it, 
that his time for enjoyment was too short to allow 
him a moment to waste. Traces of this under-note 
are to be found in the poem called cc No Coward's 
Song"; and again in the lines called "Prayer," 
which were written, I think, in 1907 — 

" Let me not know, except from printed page, 
The pain of bitter love, of baffled pride, 
Or sickness shadowing with a long presage. 

Let me not know, since happy some have died 

Quickly in youth or quietly in age, 

How faint, how loud the bravest hearts have cried." 

Flecker and I met very frequently, after the 
evening in Torrington Square, in the flat of a friend 
in South London. On these occasions he was 
nearly always surrounded by people who knew 
him better than I did, and my impressions are now 
a little blurred. But I retain a glimpse of him 
sitting at the piano, dressed up in a Japanese 
kimono, smiling his pleasant, rather sardonic smile 
and thumping out the tune of " La branche de 
Lilas " or " Navaho " while the rest of us shouted 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 9 

the choruses. And I remember many amusing 
contests of wit, in almost all of which Flecker 
came off best. Not quite in all, however, for I 
was present at his Waterloo. The cult of the 
Suburban Music-hall was just beginning in those 
days, in " interior ' : circles, and it was a little 
Cockney dancer called Gertie who, on an historic 
evening — our hostess shamelessly abetting her — 
succeeded in worsting him. Gertie must have 
learnt her back-chat in the New Cut, or else have 
taken lessons from a bus-conductor. Never before 
have I listened to such a torrent of droll invective 
as she poured out on the poet's (for once) defence- 
less head ! Flecker' s wit on that occasion was 
certainly no match for Gertie's humour ; though I 
think this was the only time I ever knew him to be 
verbally at a disadvantage. 

The incident which really formed the beginning 
of my more intimate acquaintance with Flecker 
is one which reveals him so clearly that I must 
relate it, though it be at my own expense. When 
his first volume of poems, The Bridge of Fire, was 
published, I expected something prodigious, and 
got Lord Alfred Douglas to let me have it to review 
for The Academy. Alas, the book did not at all 
come up to the expectations I had formed, and in 
my disappointment I felt constrained to administer 
a sincere, if rather jejune, " slating." One took 



10 REPUTATIONS 

oneself with tremendous solemnity in those days, 
and all our little circle was scandalised. Every 
one, indeed, was extremely angry with me — except 
Flecker. For all I know he may have been amused 
and interested to hear one note of criticism, however 
inept, amid a chorus of equally inept praise. In 
any case he contented himself with addressing a 
rejoinder to The Academy, which was published the 
week after my notice — a rejoinder of much skill 
and the most perfect good temper. And when, 
some time later, I myself commenced author with 
a pamphlet of youthful verses, he heaped coals 
of fire on my head by taking the trouble to review 
it in a Cambridge paper, in terms of the greatest 
generosity. 

Our connection of author and publisher, which 
was to last until his death, began when, in 1910, 
I started a monthly magazine of earnest literary 
aspirations. In the first number of this periodical 
Flecker's most intimate Oxford friend had let me 
print a poem called "The Visit"; and Flecker 
himself became a fairly frequent contributor. 
The poems called " In Memoriam," " Pillage," and 
" The War Song of the Saracens " first appeared 
in its pages, and one or two others which I think 
have not been reprinted. About this time I 
induced the firm which owned the magazine to 
issue a volume of Flecker's verses, to which he gave 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 11 

the title Thirty-six Poems. But the concern 
having unfortunately more good intent than 
capital or business management, the volume did 
not prosper, and on the demise of the magazine, 
after a year's unavailing struggle for existence, 
the sheets of Flecker's book were transferred to 
Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons., Ltd. Messrs. Dent re- 
issued the book in 1911 with six additional pieces, 
under the more familiar title, Forty-two Poems. 

For the next two years I heard but little of 
Flecker. He left England to take up a Consular 
appointment, and was stationed first at Constanti- 
nople, then at Smyrna, and finally at Beirut. In 
1911 he travelled in Greece, and it was at Athens 
that he married the Greek lady, Mdlle. Helle 
Skiadaressi, who was to prove to him so true a 
companion and friend, and whose devotion did so 
much to prolong his life. 

It was not until early in 1913 that I got into 
touch with him again. I had at that time become 
associated with the firm of Max Goschen, which 
had just started business. (This firm, owing to the 
regretted death of its proprietor, who was killed 
in France in the early days of the war, no longer 
exists.) Flecker wrote to me from Beirut in 
February 1913, mentioning that he had a new book 
of verse nearly ready and lamenting the poor 
sales of his Forty-two Poems. 



12 REPUTATIONS 

By now — and, indeed, ever since the days of 
The Academy review — my belief in Flecker was 
unshakable, and I knew that sooner or later he 
was bound to come into his own. I was delighted 
when he accepted our offer for his new book, 
which was made before we had seen any of the MS., 
and I wrote to promise that I personally would do 
all I possibly could to push the sales. It was to 
this end, with a view to " stirring up the pond ' 
and goading the reviewers into animation, that I 
urged him to write the now famous " Preface," 
and to make it fiercely controversial. 

The first of the letters from Flecker which I 
have been able to find among my papers is date^K 
May 10, and came from Beirut. 

Already his illness was upon him, and there is 
no doubt that the task of getting The Golden Journey 
to Samarkand into its final shape (after very heavy 
and painstaking alterations) exhausted all his 
strength. 

" I am very ill again," he writes, " and probably 
shall come to England. Can't work at much and 
hardly at this letter. The Preface was an awful 
strain. 55 

He did not, of course, return to England (which 
he was never to see again), but w r ent instead to 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 13 

Switzerland. His next letter, dated June 5, came 
from Leysin-sur-Aigle — 

" Thank the Lord this place is curing me. The 
journey nearly killed me. There is nothing terribly 
wrong — but I shall take a month or two to recover, 
and always have to live with precaution. Meantime 
many thanks for your kind letter. Herewith I 
have sent the proofs complete. Please look over 
the revise — or ' Taoping ' in its new version w r ill 
come out in a hash. 

"Left out first page of Preface as being rather 
babyish. You might let me know what you think 
of the book — and especially of my alterations to 
' Gates of Damascus ' and ' Taoping.' I am im- 
mensely proud of it. I've turfed out all the rot. 
It seems to me — and to the few critics who have 
seen it — to be miles ahead of the Forty-two. If the 
publisher wants to puff me he can safely say that 
the Oriental Poems are unique in English. 

" I do wish one could have a few de luxe copies 
(as they do in France) on fine paper with fine 
binding. 

" I have, alas, lost a good deal more than £10 
in not having time to get all the poems into mags. 
In particular c Oak and Olive ' was being kept by 
the Fortnightly, and they sent it back because 
they had no time to publish it by June. But never 
mind, let's out with the book at once ! 

" I have some glorious translations from Paul 
Fort and other modern Frenchmen, but I preferred 



14 REPUTATIONS 

to keep The Golden Journey original from beginning 
to end, 



55 



I heard again from him a week later, still from 
Leysin — a long and very lucid business letter, 
chiefly about The King of Alsander and the be- 
haviour of another publisher who, after accepting 
the book and getting Flecker to alter it two or 
three times, eventually refused to bring it out on 
the ground that he had " lost interest." There 
can be no point in recalling such a controversy 
now ; and it is only fair to the publisher in question 
to assume that there were two sides to the dispute. 
Flecker continues thus about the book — 

" The novel, originally a very poor production, 
is now a very jolly and fantastic work. Whether 
it will sell or not I don't believe a publisher in the 
world could say. It may take or it mayn't. I'll 
send it to you if you like. But — 

" (a) Messrs. Goschen may well fight shy of a 
book which another publisher has broken his 
contract to evade publishing. 

" (b) It might be better to get compensation 
before I get another publisher. Yet it might again 
be better the other way." 

" Messrs. Goschen," needless to say, were quite 
prepared to publish anything which Flecker chose 
to send them. I must, however, confess that 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 15 

when the MS. of The King of Als cinder reached me 
my heart sank a little, in spite of all the pleasant 
memories which the opening chapters revived. 
I did not think the book had much chance of 
selling, or, indeed, that it particularly deserved to 
sell, and I wrote to Flecker explaining my reasons 
for this opinion. 

His reply is dated June 21 — 

" My dear Goldring, 

" Thanks so much for writing promptly 
and at such length. The novel is a most patchy 
affair — I quite agree with you. I am not a novelist 
because I don't really think novels worth writing — 
at the bottom of my heart. Yet I did not burn 
the old King of Alsander — it is, by God, seven years 
since I lost the first three chapters of it on the way 

to Paris with and of your acquaintance — 

because it has, with all its faults, some passages 
which I think rather jolly, and because even if a 
bit laboured in parts, it is such a joyously silly 
performance. 

"I have written to Goschens accepting their 
offer. 

" A drama is a thing, now, that is worth writing. 
I have had most encouraging letters about my work 
in that direction from , but I hope that Gran- 
ville Barker and no other will take up Hassan, my 
Oriental play. It may interest you to know 
that Yasmin is out of my play — was written for 
it — and also The Golden Journey to Samarkand 



16 REPUTATIONS 

is nothing but the final scene. I admit a little 
verse into my play here and there. 

" Read the poem called ' The Golden Journey ' 
and consider the c Pilgrim with the beautiful 
voice ' to be Hassan, the hero of a whole drama, 
and think what it would sound like actually 
on the stage, with Granville Barker scenery — 
moonlight. 

" More alive to-day. I hope the novel may 
succeed after all. It is pleasant of you to be so 
prompt. The misery of literary people ! The 
Spectator and The Nation will return or accept 

pretty quick. The ' ' is hopeless, utterly. 

c ' are, I think, mad. Good God, if one 

ran the rottenest of little Vice-Consulates in the 

way the c ' is run, there'd be a row in a 

month ! 

" Ever yours thankfully, 

" J. E. Flecker. 



cc P.S. — (1) Should much like to read your novel; 
didn't know you'd written one. 

" (2) What do you think — if by any chance 
The Golden Journey gets known — of having the 
Oriental poems (plus 6 Saracens ' and ' Ballad 
of Iskander ' from 42) illustrated by Syme for 
a Xmas volume? 

" (3) Shan't anthologise after what you told me. 
Thanks." 

I had one more letter from him from Leysin 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 17 

(dated June 30, 1913) in which the following 
interesting passage occurs — 

" c In Phasecia ' (the rottenest poem in the book) 
should appear in Everyman and c Taoping ' in 
The Spectator (eh, what ? the citadel of respecta- 
bility stormed !) this week. Did you see Solomon 
Eagle's extremely amusing jibe at me in The New 
Statesman? Who is he? Am getting fatter and 
stronger. I hope to be in England producing my 
play this autumn. Why does no one translate 
great French books like Jules Renard's Lanterne 
Sourde or Claude Farrere's marvellous Battaille?" 

The Golden Journey to Samarkand was issued 
in the early part of July, and was a success almost 
from the first. About this time Flecker moved 
from Leysin to Montana, and the next letter from 
him which I have unearthed came from there, 
dated August 31 — 

" I have been a most shameful time answering 
your delightful and enthusiastic letter of con- 
gratulation, for which I thank you most heartily. 
The reviews — especially The Times and The Morning 
Post — have been good enough for Shakespeare : 
I do hope they will even be enough to sell a few 
copies of the book ; I should hate Goschens to be 
badly had by the transaction. 

" I have been bothered lately trying to find a 
new place to live in, and only got here after a 
c 



18 REPUTATIONS 

frightful lot of bother. I am pretty sick of life. 
I've finished my play, but I don't suppose it will 
ever be played. . . ." 

This letter also contained one of the suggestions 
for books in which he was so fertile — 

" I shall write a book one day," he says, " on 
how to spend money in a jolly way, for men of 
moderate income (£500-£1500 a year). Tell the 

's they ought to travel. The book will sell 

by the hundred thousand million on the railway 
bookstalls." 

In another letter he gives us a glimpse of his life 
at Montana — 

" There is perpetual sunshine here and perpetual 
leisure. Otherwise there's no particular reason for 
my continued existence. I get neither better 
nor worse, and wait all day for news of Hassan" 

From this time onwards, perhaps inspired by the 
magnificent success of The Golden Journey, he sent 
me a stream of projects for books, none of which 
he was ever destined to carry out. The only one 
which he seems seriously to have started, is a 
translation of Virgil's Mneid, VI, of which, in a 
letter dated " Sunday," he writes as follows — 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 19 

" My next book is half written. It is, I'm 
afraid, rather horrifying. This is the title — 

AN INTERPRETATION 

IN BLANK VERSE 
OF 

VIRGIL, mNEID, VI, 

based on the poetic Value of the Sounds, 

together with the Latin text 

and ten Prefaces, 

by 
JAMES ELROY FLECKER 

120 pp. Wide margins. Paper, 3s. 6d. ? Ready 

in February. 

Seriously this is exactly the title I intend to give 
the book, with which I am well advanced already. 
The book is simply an attempt to do a transla- 
tion of Virgil as satisfactory as Fitzgerald's 
c Omar ' — a translation which will utterly 
eclipse the very numerous and very feeble attempts 
hitherto existing. 

" The ten Prefaces will be as combative as 
Bernard Shaw's, and occupy some forty pages. 
They will be on the translation of sound, on blank 
verse, on Hell literature, on preceding translations 
of Virgil, on Modern Scholarship, on the Modern 
Spirit, etc., etc., and should irritate every one as 
effectually as my Preface to Samarkand." 



20 REPUTATIONS 

Here is yet another project, contained in an 
undated letter — 

" I have long had a scheme for bringing out 
an Anthology of French verse. Poets of To-day 
and Yesterday — from after Hugo and Musset, and 
not including them, to the present day. Each poet 
would be preceded by a short notice. 

" In the idea of the short notice and in the 
period traversed the book would thus resemble 
Walch's great three- volume work — but in no other 
way. 

" (1) There would be a larger and very different 
choice of the more important people and none of 
the pages of dreary rot by the great unknown. 

" (2) The criticisms at the beginning would be 
original and not borrowed. 

■ c (3) The whole book w r ould not be more than 
one volume." 

And here is a third suggested volume, some 
materials for which may perhaps have been found 
among the papers which he left — 

" I have, it is true, a vague scheme for a book. 
I have quaint ideas on most things — literature, of 
course, but also current politics — and a million 
other things. I find that exile makes it useless 
trying to work these ideas up into articles, and also 
that if I do turn them into articles all my dear ideas 
become heavy and dull. I don't, for instance, a bit 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 21 

want to write a long review on H. G. Wells. But 
I do want to say and state my opinion for posterity 
that his latest work is pompous drivel, and that 
Mr. Polly is one of the best things ever written in 
any language. 

" I might call the book ' Poet's Porridge ' and 
should write it very quickly. Under headings 
Literature, Politics, etc., it would consist of little 
brief paragraphs of rather pithy comment. You 
may not know that I am a violent Philhellene : 
that will come in also. (I am writing a magnificent 
coronation ode for King Constantine.) 

" Just mention the idea to Goschens, will you? 
Then if they'd like to see a bit, I'll scrape together 
a few pages and send them as a specimen. There 
is something novel about a poet damning round 
on current events : only, of course, I ought to be 
better known than I am to get a hearing." 

His last letter to me from Montana is undated, 
like the others, but since it appears to have been 
written after the issue of The King of Alsandcr, it 
was probably sent early in 1914 — 

" You know my play Hassan is going to be 
played in London this autumn if all goes well; 
I've got an excellent collaborator. Goschens shall 
print it — but only after it's played, and that's a 
long way off yet. 

" Otherwise I try to revise another older play of 
mine, and when not sufficiently inspired for that 



22 REPUTATIONS 

I do the Virgil, which Gilbert Murray has pro- 
nounced to be the best translation of him in English. 

" I can't work much, and haven't at present 
any original ideas in my head. I'm only just now 
managing to get up to lunch after three months' 
illness. Hope to go to Locarno soon — will send 
you address if I move. As for poems I've only 
written four since Samarkand, and they be small 
ones. . . . 

" I owe you many thanks for having introduced 
me to Goschens. They are certainly advertising 
excellently. I shall be not only disappointed, but 
astonished if The King of Alsander don't move. . . . 

" That c ' do irritate me (I don't refer to 

your excellent review) with its childish anti-God 
rubbish — (we're about two hundred years ahead 
of these asses on the Continent, in the middle of 
a Catholic reaction, and leave that sort of vul- 
garity to the plebs) — and its ridiculous abuse of 
Tennyson and other Victorians. Do they really 

imagine writes as well as Tennyson or Kipling ? 

It's astonishing ! 

"Do write again. Do you ever see ? If 

so, remember me fondly." 

The last three of his letters which I have pre- 
served were sent from Davos Platz, and make 
unutterably sad reading. In the first of them he 
writes, " I'm so damned ill I'm almost in despair," 
and speaks of his disappointment at having lost 
the Polignac prize, recording the fact that Professor 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 23 

Gilbert Murray and Mr. W. B. Yeats voted for 
him. The second is dated June 1 — 

" My dear Goldring, 

c< (1) Do send me any news there is going. 

" (2) No, my dear fellow, don't ask me if I can 
write a book about Greece — descriptive tour. I 
can only preserve the rotten remnants of my life 
by lying in bed here for years — in the ugliest hole 
God ever created. 

" (3) But I do intend to publish my great ode 
to Greece separately with a forty-page preface of 
a most violent kind, full of abuse and invective 
of pro-Turks, pro-Bulgars, the Liberal Press, with 
history of the Eastern question. I should much 
value an assurance that Goschens would take this ; 
it might create a bit of a stir. 

" (4) I'm still waiting to hear from Oxford about 
my Virgil, and haven't done a line more to it, 
or, indeed, to anything for months. ... I want to 
write a play on Judith, and I ought to revise my 
Don Juan, and I've got to work Hassan with my 
collaborator. And day after day I do nothing. . . . 

" Ever yours, 

" James Elroy Flecker. 

" I'd give all my poems to be a healthy navvy." 

The last letter is dated October 12, 1914— 

" My dear Goldring, 

" I should much like to hear from you. . . • 
We've got a flat, and I amuse myself by lying in 



24 REPUTATIONS 

bed all day. I can write only a very little in the 
morning; have pupped a War poem and some 
prose. Could we send a dozen of our novels to 
the navy ? the officers it seems have only too much 
time for reading ! Do give me news of you. . ." 

He died on January 3, 1915. 



II 

Perhaps in no other art are the fashions more 
capricious than in that of poetry, and the statement 
may be hazarded that whenever a poet finds 
himself on the crest of fashion's wave his reputation 
is usually in peril. There seem to be two ways 
for a poet to become fashionable in England. The 
first is for him to be immensely admired by a clique 
of reviewers and their friends, the literati, none of 
whom, of course, buy his books; the other — the 
more immediately profitable, the more ultimately 
disastrous way — is for him to be " raved about " 
by cultured young women in elegant London 
drawing-rooms. But either way is, as often as not, 
a short cut to oblivion. Flecker was lucky in 
escaping them both. In his lifetime he was never 
fashionable, and few things were more impressive 
about him than his aloofness. He was generously 
treated by his reviewers (in spite of his amusing 
strictures on them), but never boomed by any one 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 25 

circle of critics. After his Oxford days he was 
never in a " set." The people who admired him 
were scattered, widely divergent types, mostly 
unknown to one another. He was very little 
known, I think, to his brother poets, certainly to 
the more " advanced " section, several of whom 
I have heard remark at different times : " Who is 
Flecker ? Is he any good ? " Flecker followed his 
own path, looking neither to the right nor to the 
left, and apparently but little influenced by any 
of his contemporaries. Until, with the approach 
of death, his powers began to fail him, his literary 
record is one of unbroken progress. 

Flecker' s entire output of verse and prose during 
his lifetime, not counting unpublished work and 
contributions to periodicals, was limited to seven 
or eight small volumes, one of which, his admirable 
Scholar's Italian Book, is clearly in a class by itself. 
He made two attempts at prose fiction, an amusing 
undergraduate effort called The Last Generation, 
and his solitary novel, The King of Alsander. This 
last has always seemed to me an unsatisfactory and 
unequal performance. It has flashes of wit here 
and there, a few good passages of rather mannered 
prose, and many slabs of " fine writing." But as 
a jeu d'esprit it is distinctly heavy and over- 
weighted ; and the high spirits are only intermittent. 
The majority of the reviewers praised the book 



26 REPUTATIONS 

immoderately on its appearance, but I don't think 
Flecker himself was much impressed by their 
eulogies. 

Within its narrow compass, the little-known 
" Dialogue on Education " called The Grecians 
is perhaps the most perfect of Flecker's prose 
works. I do not think any one who has not read 
this book can get a proper appreciation of his mind 
and outlook, for of all his work it is, in some ways, 
the most intimately self -revealing. The " Dia- 
logue " enshrines the conversation of two school- 
masters — Hofman, the scientist, and Edwinson, 
the classic — who, while on a visit to Bologna, fall 
in with a beautiful youth and join with him in a 
discussion on educational reform. Each gives his 
view of the questions at issue, until finally the 
beautiful youth sums up the argument and launches 
forth into a dissertation on the ideal school. 
" Keeping clear before me all the danger I run of 
turning my pupils into dilettanti, I am going to 
teach them to be as far as possible universal in 
their comprehensions and admiration of the 
mysteries and beauties of life. Our Grecians, when 
they leave us, will have seen, as it were, from a 
height suddenly, the whole world of knowledge 
stretching out in rich plains and untraversed seas." 

The picture is delightful; but one cannot have 
things both ways, I suppose, and certain doubts 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 27 

inevitably drift into one's mind. With their eyes 
dazzled by this radiant vision of " Knowledge " 
how should the little Grecians learn to pursue 
Understanding, that elusive shadow? But the 
passage reveals Flecker to us, reveals him in a 
characteristic and very attractive light. He him- 
self was a rare scholar, not so much in regard to 
his actual attainments (though they were con- 
siderable) as from the fact that his scholarship 
really enriched him, coloured his whole outlook, 
made the world a lovelier place for him. His mind 
was so steeped in the atmosphere of the classic 
poets that he saw life and all the world as it were 
through rose-tinted spectacles. Out of the loveli- 
ness which met his gaze he has re-created for us 
in his poetry a fairyland in which it is an enchant- 
ment to wander. Yet it must be admitted that 
these spectacles to some extent restricted his 
vision and limited its range : his fairyland has walls. 
This perhaps explains why his poetry is at its 
best when he deals with subjects which are obviously 
' poetic." His was never the genius to find poetry 
in the raw material of ordinary existence, as, for 
example, is the way with Mr. D. H. Lawrence. 
Even when he writes of London his hand is 
unsteady; and of all his poems the "Ballad of 
Camden Town " is the only one which is uncon- 
sciously absurd. " The Burial in England," the 



28 REPUTATIONS 

last great poem which he wrote, and a fine piece of 
work in the " big bow-wow " style, is another 
illustration of this point. The European War 
stirred Flecker deeply, and though he planned and 
carried through a grandiose war poem, he did not 
treat his theme with any real conviction. " The 
Burial in England " is full of ingenious epithets, 
rich in poetic " ornament," and so wonderful and 
complicated in its technique that a superficial 
reader might easily mistake it for a masterpiece. 
But once strip it of its jewelled phrases, of its 
beauties of craftsmanship, and it will appear as 
devoid of true inspiration and originality of 
thought as the average leading article. 

As a critic, Flecker was distinguished by a great 
capacity for enthusiastic appreciation — a quality 
far too rare and valuable to be despised. Almost 
any one can pick holes in another's work : it 
requires a finer sensibility to appreciate and reveal 
excellence. Unfortunately his enthusiasms, if in- 
fectious, were apt to carry him off his feet, apt to 
lead him into extravagant praise of writers whom he 
admired, and extravagant denunciation of writers 
whom he didn't admire. One got the impression 
that for him the poets were divided into those who 
were " magnificent " and those who wrote " God- 
forsaken muck." But his preferences were founded 
in the main on knowledge and sound judgment. 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 29 

He was innocent of literary snobbishness ; he was 
not ashamed of admiring Tennyson, and even 
Kipling; he never descended to the fashionable 
vulgarity of abusing the Victorians. 

Flecker's first volume of verse, The Bridge of 
Fire, though it contains indications of his future 
powers, still seems to me to have in it much that 
is poor or merely imitative, and a few pieces, like 
the dismally unfunny " Ballad of Hampstead 
Heath," which are frankly bad. Most of the best 
poems in this book were much worked over — not 
always with happy results — before they reappeared 
in the later volume. The beautiful " Tenebris 
Interlucentem " was vastly improved, almost re- 
created, in its later version; but some of the 
alterations to other pieces are not so successful. 
In the little poem called " We that were Friends," 
for example, he has made a change in the first 
verse without improving it, while leaving in the 
second the unfortunate line, " Whom dreams 
delight and passions please." (Whatever passions 
may do it is difficult to think of them as " pleasing " 
anybody — except perhaps a fish, to whom a passion 
might be a " pleasing " surprise.) Another altera- 
tion which some of those who possess The Bridge 
of Fire will regret, is in the last verse of the poem 
called " The Ballad of the Student in the South." 
The first line of this verse originally ran : " We're 



30 REPUTATIONS 

of the people, you and I." In the version con- 
tained in the Collected Poems this has been changed 
to, " For we are simple, you and I " — a much 
weaker and more " literary " way of saying the 
same thing. 

It was with his Forty-two Poems that Flecker 
definitely established his position among the poets 
of his time. Many of us will not forget the excite- 
ment of first reading that marvellous " Ballad 
of Iskander " ; and in such poems as " The Masque 
of the Magi," and " Joseph and Mary " he showed 
the same clearness of outline and almost pre- 
Raphaelite vividness of colour which distinguish 
The Golden Journey to Samarkand. Almost all the 
finest of Flecker's poetry is to be found in the 
Forty-two Poems and in The Golden Journey to 
Samarkand. Of the later w r ork included in the 
Collected Poems there are not perhaps more than 
three pieces which are equal to the best which 
these volumes contain. These three, how r ever, are 
of particular interest. I think no other poem of 
Flecker's is quite so moving as the exquisite piece 
called " Stillness," with its wonderful last verse — 

" Then twittering out in the night my thought -birds flee, 
I am emptied of all my dreams : 
I only hear Earth turning, only see 
Ether's long bankless streams, 
And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand 
on me." 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 31 

This poem seems almost to make clear that had 
Flecker lived he would ultimately have shed his 
Parnassian theory, and allowed himself, more often, 
to be subjective. Among all his poems it seems 
to me to be in a place by itself. Of the other 
pieces issued for the first time in book form in the 
Collected Poems, " The Old Ships " and " The Pensive 
Prisoner," with its strange, haunting music, are per- 
haps the most beautiful. But apart from these three 
poems, the most important of the Collected Poems 
are those which were originally published under the 
title of The Golden Journey to Samarkand. It was 
not until Flecker went to the Levant, and found in 
travel in Turkey and Greece and among the islands 
of the iEgean the greatest inspiration of his life, 
that he really came into his own. The Golden 
Journey to Samarkand is the book of his maturity, 
in which all his finest poetic qualities are displayed 
to the full, all his weaknesses expunged. Considered 
as a book, it marks as great an advance on Forty- 
two Poems as did the Forty-two Poems on The Bridge 
of Fire. Not only is his own description of the 
Oriental poems as being " unique in English " 
fully justified, but few poems in our literature 
show a more passionate love of England than 
those which he wrote in Syria and in Greece. 
What Englishman can read the opening lines of 
" Brumana," for example, and remain unthrilled? 



32 REPUTATIONS 

" Oh shall I never never be home again ? 
Meadows of England shining in the rain 
Spread wide your daisied lawns : your ramparts green 
With briar fortify, with blossom screen 
Till my far morning — and O streams that slow 
And pure and deep through plains and playlands go, 
For me your love and all your kingcups store, 
And — dark militia of the southern shore, 
Old fragrant friends — preserve me the last lines 
Of that long saga which you sung me, pines, 
When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree 
I listened, with my eyes upon the sea." 

It was fortunate for Flecker that the kind of 
poetry which by temperament, by intellectual 
equipment and by the circumstances of his birth 
and upbringing he was most capable of writing 
seems to have been just the kind which he most 
wanted to write. In this respect his career, short 
as it was, was singularly happy. He followed no 
literary wild-goose chase. He was not, apparently, 
dissatisfied with his manner, only with his work- 
manship, which never satisfied him. At least a 
part of his genius seems to have lain in a realisa- 
tion of his exact capacities. He seldom gropes 
after things which are too high for him. I think 
it can nowhere be said of him that he " wrought 
better than he knew " ; and, to judge from his 
constant emendations, he seems to have had an 
almost exaggerated distrust of what Mr. Arthur 
Symons has somewhere called " the plenary 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 33 

inspiration of first thoughts." In some ways he 
was more typically a French than an English 
poet, and his description of the Parnassians in the 
Preface to The Golden Journey to Samarkand 
applies to himself almost exactly. Like them he 
loathed romantic egoism and aimed at " a beauty 
somewhat statuesque " ; like them he had a fine 
sense of language, using words and epithets with 
the nicest scholarship and taste; and, again, like 
them he derived his inspiration from the classics, 
from history, from mythology, from beautiful 
names, from places, and, indeed, from anything 
rather than from life. It was hardly ever life — either 
in its " ordinariness " or in its strangeness — which 
Flecker succeeded in transmuting into poetry. 
His work is an escape from life, rather than an 
interpretation of it. And here and there, in his 
less-inspired moments, one feels that it is only 
its technical brilliance which saves it from having 
too limiting a flavour of " Oxford College." His 
poetry is usually rather cold, and it cannot be 
claimed for Flecker that he was remarkable for 
originality of thought. His emotional range is 
limited, and his greatest strength lies in his power 
to create pictures compact, clear in outline, and 
rich in colour, and in the haunting music of which 
he had the secret. " Emaux et Camees " would 
not have made a bad alternative title for his 

D 



34 REPUTATIONS 

collected work; and there are times when he 
strikes one as being an artificer with imagination, 
or rather when his art seems to resemble that of 
the jeweller or worker in precious metals. His 
poems, although never rising to the highest 
imaginative level, are yet hammered and worked 
till they attain a hard, indestructible perfection. 
It is difficult to believe that verse of such a char- 
acter will be quickly forgotten, for it seems to 
possess all the qualities necessary for permanence. 
Flecker' s poetry depends on nothing transitory 
for its interest; it contains no message to grow 
stale ; and the extraordinary amount of work put 
into his verses gives them an impressive solidity. 
It must always be remembered of Flecker that in 
an age of anarchy in verse he took the trouble to 
become a master of technique ; in an age of form- 
lessness he upheld the finest traditions of form. 
What was beautiful two thousand years ago is 
beautiful still ; and, as Flecker has told us himself, 
it was with the single object of creating beauty 
that his poems were written. Who can read them 
and imagine for a moment that he failed in his 
object ? One cannot think that the glowing visions 
which his poems bring before the mind will prove 
any less enchanting to readers in the centuries to 
come than they are to-day. One cannot believe that 
his lines "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence " 



JAMES ELROY FLECKER 35 

will fail to carry their message through the ages 
to some craftsman as conscientious as himself — 

" O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, 

Student of our sweet English tongue, 
Read out my words at night, alone : 
I was a poet, I was young. 

Since I can never see your face, 
And never shake you by the hand, 

I send my soul through time and space, 
To greet you. You will understand." 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 

I. Compton Mackenzie 

If the ordinary circulating library subscriber 
were asked for the names of the three English 
novelists still under forty who have most 
definitely " arrived," ten to one he (or she) would 
mention Mr. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. Hugh 
Walpole and Mr. Gilbert Cannan. The success of 
this triumvirate when — their apprenticeship served 
— they assembled under the banner of Mr. Martin 
Seeker to make their respective bids for fame, was 
immediate, and in some ways perhaps unprece- 
dented. For theirs was not merely a success of 
vulgar popularity, it was a succes d'estime as well. 
Novel readers who borrowed the works of these 
writers from their libraries felt that they were not 
quite as other novel readers, that they were dis- 
playing kultur. And, thanks either to their 
eminent social qualifications, to the skill and tact 
of their impresario, or to their own undoubted 
talents, these three pretty men very soon 
came to stand for the " younger generation " 
whenever the " older generation " wished to 

39 



40 REPUTATIONS 

patronise their juniors or to pontificate about 
them. Even Mr. Henry James spun a stately 
web of words around them in The Times Literary 
Supplement. It was not necessary to read what 
he had written to feel that since he had actually 
examined and discussed their works they must be 
of astounding merit. Where the high, august ones 
had pronounced, it was not for the mere reviewers 
to do anything but echo and enlarge. Thus, 
like a snowball, the prestige of these three novelists 
increased from year to year until the disruptive 
influence of the War intervened to break the spell 
and to impose a reconsideration of every opinion, 
whether aesthetic or political, which we entertained 
before its outbreak. The War has hung up all 
literary careers, those of the successful as w r ell as 
those of the unknown, and it is hard to believe 
that any novelist can have emerged from it with 
his reputation unaltered. 

Of the three writers here grouped together, the 
one who has been hitherto the most successful has 
perhaps suffered most in critical esteem. Mr. 
Mackenzie has emerged from the War an established 
" best-seller "; as a serious novelist he seems to 
have resigned business. The chief deficiencies from 
which Mr. Mackenzie's earlier novels suffered were in 
fire, passion, spontaneity. The War may have pro- 
vided him with vivid copy, which he will, no doubt, 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 41 

use with his accustomed skill ; but to judge from 
his latest books it is hard to believe that it has in 
any way affected the springs of his being, or given 
his work a fresh orientation. Each new book 
which comes from his pen seems frothier than the 
last, though as he becomes less ambitious he 
certainly grows more readable. Perhaps it is that 
he has come to realise his own limitations, to 
realise that his supreme gift is for the lightest 
kind of entertainment. 

In spite of the attempt made by the circulating 
libraries to ban Sinister Street on the ground of 
immorality, Mr. Mackenzie had come, by August 
1914, to be " the dear Dean's " favourite novelist. 
" The Dean " (and he may be taken as typical of the 
intellectual outlook of a large section of the English 
upper-middle class) considered that Mr. Mackenzie's 
highly-coloured photographs of Leicester Square 
were real tranches de vie — horrible, pitiful, but oh, 
so true ! For " the Dean " and his like, the fact 
that Mr. Mackenzie, when at Oxford, belonged 
clearly to a good set in a good college, was of 
great importance. Mr. Mackenzie's Oxford career 
has, indeed, been invaluable to him — up to a point 
— in his career as a novelist. He was a dazzling 
figure in the days when he used to walk hatless 
down the Corn — the cynosure of every eye — with a 
romantic cloak over his shoulder, his hair brushed 



42 REPUTATIONS 

back in Byronic disorder, and the blue cover of 
The Oxford Point of View just visible under his arm. 
His reputation in that University circle which forms 
such an influential part of literary London, was 
made even before he published his first book, and 
proved sufficiently robust to stand that shock. 
For thin as the sheaf of " early poems " with which 
most writers begin their literary lives usually is, 
the paper-bound volume of Poems with which 
Mr. Mackenzie commenced author, with Mr. Black- 
well's aid, was emptier than anything of the kind 
which I can recall. Early poems, as a rule, at 
least reveal the main tendencies of the author's 
mind, its texture, its possibilities. Mr. Mac- 
kenzie's were a casket of most artistic design, 
filled with nothing save the dust of libraries. But 
any ground he may have lost by his poems was 
soon regained on the publication of The Passionate 
Elopement. Few first novels have been more 
brilliantly launched or more abundantly adver- 
tised than this. It was " costume drama," inten- 
tionally artificial, with no serious attempt at 
psychology or characterisation; but it was ex- 
tremely well done, and it proved that Mr. Mackenzie 
was, at all events, capable of a job of work, and 
had no intention of becoming a mere dilettante. 
This capacity for work was shown in a still more 
striking way in Carnival, Mr. Mackenzie's first 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 43 

effort at depicting the life of his own time. It was 
evident at once that the setting of the story had 
been studied with minute care. The same inde- 
fatigable accumulation of detail which charac- 
terises Mr. Arnold Bennett's long novels about his 
native Five Towns was here applied to subjects 
selected deliberately for their romantic interest. 
No one would choose to read about the Five 
Towns if Mr. Bennett did not force him to do so 
by appealing to the public's love of literary photo- 
graphy. Mr. Mackenzie adopted the photographic 
method, but, instead of applying it to a drab 
section of provincial life, he applied it to the kind 
of life most likely to interest the largest number of 
people. He w r as thus to some extent the fore- 
runner of the cinema. He brought the more highly 
coloured portions of the world before his reader's 
eyes; and he eschewed " drabness " like the plague. 
His mean streets, his low life had the specious 
glamour of what is metropolitan, and were relieved 
with bright splashes of garish illumination from 
Leicester Square and with the rich greens and 
greys of the Cornish landscape. 

Considered purely as a piece of literary photo- 
graphy, Carnival showed that already Mr. 
Mackenzie had little to learn about cameras. 
When he described a room he might have been 
actually sitting in it, in such detail were its contents 



44 REPUTATIONS 

recorded ; when he wrote of the appearance of a 
street, or of the outside of a house, the amazed 
reader felt that that street or that house must 
actually have been before his eyes at the time. 
His descriptions of the outward and physical 
characteristics of his human puppets were no less 
complete than his descriptions of their environ- 
ment. To the hearts of many of his struggling 
fellow- craftsmen Carnival simply struck con- 
sternation. Here was a newcomer who was pre- 
pared to take unheard-of pains. The public would 
be sure to gobble up his work, and would expect the 
same kind of thing in all the other novels they 
read. Thus the whole wretched job of turning out 
commercial fiction would be made more difficult. 
Note-books were brought out, shirt-cuffs were 
pulled down, and those writers who were too jaded 
to set their imaginations in motion started busily 
to make elaborate notes, in the hope of keeping up. 
The success w r hich followed the publication of 
Carnival, in spite of the book's " inward and 
spiritual" emptiness, was certainly deserved, and 
Mr. Mackenzie's fellow-novelists will be the first to 
admit that the book is in many ways an astonish- 
ing performance. Colour is piled on with a lavish 
hand, and so long as the author is describing the 
exteriors of places and of people, or recording 
conversations with a gramophone's fidelity, he is 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 45 

admirable. It is only when the story cannot move 
ahead without the exercise by the author of his 
imagination, when the characters are forced to 
reveal their very essence, when the appeal is not 
to the eye or to the brain, but to the centres of 
emotion, that he breaks down. For Mr. Mackenzie's 
methods of expressing any kind of human feeling 
are of the theatre, theatrical. The denouement of 
Carnival, and several of the more important situa- 
tions in the book, leave the critical reader sceptical 
and unconvinced at the very moment when the 
story demands that he should be most moved. 
The defect of Mr. Mackenzie's qualities is that he 
is so absorbed in giving a vivid presentation of his 
characters from the outside, that he usually omits 
to explore their minds and hearts and motives. 
When he does make an attempt to get below the 
surface, his psychology is all at sea, except when 
he is dealing with his favourite type of empty 
Oxford prig who is all surface, and is, indeed, at 
best only a human being in embryo. (Perhaps it is 
that, interposed between Mr. Mackenzie's mind and 
life in the raw, there is always an impermeable veil 
of " Oxford College.") The general effect of Car- 
nival is, in any case — despite all its skill, vivacity 
and colour — that of a brilliantly superficial piece 
of work lacking in sincerity and depth of feeling. 
In Mr. Mackenzie's astounding magnum opus, 



46 REPUTATIONS 

Sinister Street, the good qualities of Carnival are 
brought to their highest conceivable pitch, its 
deficiencies correspondingly exaggerated. Sinister 
Street has all the subsidiary qualities of a work of 
genius without the genius. Everything is there — 
colour, vigour, detail, skill in handling a crowded 
canvas, capacity to hold attention — everything 
except those essential qualities of human feeling, 
insight, intuition, wisdom, imaginative sympathy, 
and capacity to see people and things in just per- 
spective, without which the most brilliant novel 
that ever was written is nothing worth. To go 
from Sinister Street to one of Turgenev's short 
stories, such as First Love, or The Torrents of Spring, 
or to a novel like Mr. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, 
is like passing from an airless theatre — where the 
eye is dazzled with light and bright colours, 
and the ear filled with waltz music — into the 
sparkling air of a winter's night, with no roof 
to shut one in save the immeasurable expanses of 
the starry sky. And yet as a " document," as a 
chapter of the social history of Edwardian England, 
Sinister Street has undoubted importance. It 
embalms a period of Oxford life which will always 
be interesting to the student of manners. The 
prigs whose romantic decadence Mr. Mackenzie 
described with such affectionate care will explain 
to the historian of the future much that has 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 47 

happened during the past six years. (Indeed, if the 
War has succeeded in blotting out of English life 
for ever young men of the type of Michael Fane, if 
it has succeeded in changing the average English- 
man's attitude towards this type from admiration 
into one of contempt, it will not have been fought 
for nothing.) To re-read this immense chronicle 
of Michael's schooldays and Oxford days, and of 
his subsequent patronage of the London under- 
world, is to see the whole world-struggle in a new 
light. Perhaps Nature had to devise some means 
of purging the universe of its living dead, of its 
elderly schoolboys who refuse to grow to man's 
stature and yet were never young. Michael Fane, 
Guy Hazlewood and the others of their circle to 
whom Mr. Mackenzie introduced us are all of the 
same type, but Michael easily surpasses them. He 
is the consummate prig. His jejune sexual self- 
importance, his snobbishness, his airs of the intel- 
lectual coxcomb, his imperviousness to the spiritual 
side of life, infect nearly all the hundreds and 
hundreds of pages which the author has devoted 
to his portrayal. The educational reformer — any 
kind of reformer — who seeks material for destruc- 
tive criticism of our Public Schools and Universities, 
could have no more valuable text-books than Mr. 
Mackenzie's novels of his middle period. They are 
veracious chronicles — at least in so far as the 



48 REPUTATIONS 

Oxford characters are concerned — and, horrible as it 
may seem, they do faithfully hold up the mirror to 
Oxford life before the War. It was just as empty, 
as pretentious, as unreal, as snobbish and as 
decadent as Mr. Mackenzie makes out. Its atti- 
tude towards " Life," towards the larger world of 
London, was such as Mr. Mackenzie has described 
it. And in Sinister Street is to be found perhaps 
one of the most perfect unconscious revelations of 
a snob which exists in our literature. None of our 
satirists, not even Thackeray, has achieved what 
Mr. Mackenzie, in his passion for accuracy, accom- 
plishes apparently by accident. The passage occurs 
in the second volume of Sinister Street in the 
chapter called " Ostia Ditis." Michael Fane 
meets in a music-hall a coarse, good-natured 
individual called Drake, with whom he was at 
school, and whose family lived at one time next 
door to the Fanes. They have not met for four 
years, during which time Drake has gone into the 
City and Fane has been at Oxford. Drake stands 
his friend a drink, and in a moment of expansive- 
ness — sublimely unconscious of the great gulf 
which now yawns between them — suggests that 
Fane might like to join his Club. 

"Aren't you coming up West a bit?" asked 
Drake, in disappointment. " The night's still 
young." 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 49 

But Michael was not to be persuaded. 

" Well, don't let's lose sight of each other now 
we've met. What's your Club? I've just joined 
the Primrose myself. Not a bad little place. You 
get a rare good one-and-sixpenny lunch. You 
ought to join. Or perhaps you're already suited ? " 

" I belong to the Bath," said Michael. 

cc Oh, of course, if you're suited that's all right. 
But any time you want to join the Primrose just 
let me know and I'll put you up. The sub. isn't 
really very much. Guinea a year." 

Drake, who, after four years in the City, is pro- 
bably doing quite well, and knows possibly more 
about London than Michael, has already been made 
to ask if Cheyne Walk (whither the Fanes have 
gone to live) isn't " somewhere out Hampstead 
way." Here it is impossible not to feel that Mr. 
Mackenzie has strained the probabilities to bursting 
point in thus making him the foil to Michael's 
vulgarity. It is only Drake's side of the exquisite 
dialogue I have quoted which is incredible. Michael, 
as Mr. Mackenzie has already proved to the hilt, 
is capable of anything. 

Guy and Pauline, which shows young Oxford 
after it has " gone down " making a feeble attempt 
at love and life in a country village, draws a more 
grisly picture of our upper-middle class in pre-war 
days even than Sinister Street. Sinister Street 



50 REPUTATIONS 

merely forewarns us of the tragic fiasco which in 
Guy and Pauline is described in detail. Guy is 
shown us in the grip of his own artificiality, unable 
to shake himself free from the effects of his shoddy 
education, unable to live, and without even that 
saving Russian pessimism which might have 
spurred him on to self-destruction. It is a grey 
story, concerning itself at portentous length with 
the make-believe emotions and philanderings of 
two people who simply do not matter. And since 
there is nothing to dazzle the eye, no massing of 
bright colours, nothing in the way of divertissement 
for the unfortunate reader, it is by far the most 
tedious of Mr. Mackenzie's works. There is nothing 
in the book to distract attention from the inner 
emptiness of its author's mind. Poetic epithets 
such as " nacreous," " crepuscular," " ombre " and 
so on — coined in the Ward our Street of 1895 — 
glitter like glass emeralds in a desert of fine writing, 
and serve only to emphasise the book's vacuity. 

From every point of view Mr. Mackenzie's later 
novels, Sylvia Scarlett, Sylvia and Michael, and 
Poor Relations, seem to me the most satisfactory 
of his works. They are glorified " dime novels," 
thoroughly readable and amusing, full of colour, 
and as sumptuous as the productions of the late 
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Sylvia is, psycho- 
logically, perhaps the most interesting of Mr. 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 51 

Mackenzie's creations when we grasp her secret. 
For she is not really a woman, but a young man of a 
type which is the distinctive product of all decadent 
civilisations. Change Sylvia's sex and you have 
a character study of decided pathological interest, 
well worth serious attention. 

In all his later books Mr. Mackenzie has made 
a successful effort to leave off writing about prig- 
gish undergraduates; and he has covered up his 
inability to describe the real emotions and ex- 
periences of real people by diverting his readers 
with a series of vivid pictures. Perhaps he has 
realised that the public is mad about " the pic- 
tures," and has accordingly decided to compete 
with the " movies " on their own ground. He 
does so successfully, and the general public has 
responded as it ought to do. I would certainly far 
rather spend eight-and-sixpence on a new story by 
Mr. Mackenzie than two-and-fourpence on " Tarzan 
of the Apes," or " The Adventures of Elaine." 
The entertainment is of the same genre, but Mr. 
Mackenzie does it far better. To withhold grati- 
tude from those who afford us harmless amusement 
is the act of a curmudgeon. Mr. Mackenzie has 
found himself — not as a serious novelist, but as 
that very valuable thing, an entertainer. As such 
the success which he has achieved is thoroughly 
deserved. 



52 REPUTATIONS 

II. Hugh Walpole 

A student of English manners and psychology, 
anxious to get some idea of the thoughts and 
feelings of our landed gentry between the years 
1910 and 1920, could, I think, hardly do better 
than study the novels of Mr. Hugh Walpole. 

For Mr. Walpole has done for our old nobility 
and its offshoots very much what Mr. Compton 
Mackenzie has done for the youth of our profes- 
sional and upper-middle class. Like Mr. Henry 
James, whose influence on his work is observable, 
Mr. Walpole has an instinctive fondness for that 
select enclave, now gradually being left stranded 
because of its reduced circumstances and its 
obstinacy, which contains " the best people." 
The corner of our social life which he has chosen 
to explore is a trifle absurd, a trifle pathetic; but 
at least it is life of a sort. In ten years ' time, 
perhaps, the " hopeless " but rather delightful 
people who in his pages take such a dominant 
position in the country's affairs, who belong so 
very definitely to the " ruling class," may be 
pushed altogether out of the limelight. When 
that happens Mr. Walpole's novels will always be 
available to remind us of what they were like. 

For Mr. Walpole is charmingly old-fashioned 
enough to have a liking for duchesses ; they really 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 53 

thrill him. And, for the moment, his books appeal 
chiefly to those novel readers who also have a liking 
for duchesses. (The people who are most keenly 
interested in titles are not housemaids, as it is a 
popular fallacy to suppose, but the titled.) 

Mr. Walpole's colours are not so gorgeous or 
splashed on with so much vigour as Mr. Mackenzie's, 
but the tapestry into which he weaves them has 
usually some distinction of design. Where Mr. 
Mackenzie favours the Chronicle, and is forced to 
leave it fragmentary because he can neither suggest 
nor select, Mr. Walpole favours the " theme." 
The simile of tapestry is not inapt for his novels, 
for they are usually flat, without much atmosphere 
or movement, and his colours, though always the 
latest fashionable shades, do not palpitate, and 
suffer from lack of sunlight, like the colours of the 
academic painters of the early nineteenth century. 
Mr. Walpole, perhaps more than any of his dis- 
tinguished contemporaries, is at pains to keep in 
the forefront of fashion. He has a sharp eye for 
the latest literary modes, for the correct political, 
moral or aesthetic opinions; and he is not above 
taking notice of the other fellow's tricks. Any 
small innovation in the way of description which 
strikes him as being new or smart he is apt, sub- 
consciously, to assimilate and reproduce. He will 
describe the raising of a woman's arm, the feeling 



54 REPUTATIONS 

of opening your napkin at dinner in a strange 
house, the look of Piccadilly Circus on an evening 
in the Season, just as one or other of his con- 
temporaries might do it, but with the personal 
touch omitted. 

From my point of view, since I do not belong 
to the " best people," and thus have no intense 
personal interest in their doings, what is most 
tedious about Mr. Walpole's later books is their 
lack of variety in characterisation. The family 
likeness between all his men and women is too 
strongly marked. The Beaminsters in The Duchess 
of Wrexe have a kind of immovable, unchangeable 
quality which is doubtless true to life; but when 
the same figures are reproduced again and again 
the tapestry degenerates into figured wall-paper, 
and his procession of elegant people suggests the 
stage army which multiplies itself indefinitely. It 
is really little to be wondered at that when, for 
the purposes of his plots, Mr. Walpole brings 
ordinary men and women from the romantic, 
complex, outside world into the prim cage in which 
his Beaminsters and Trenchards chirrup, strut 
and quarrel they seem immediately to become 
asphyxiated. For example, when Philip Mark, 
who leaves behind him a mistress and all sorts of 
highly-coloured experiences in Russia, is brought 
within the purview of The Green Mirror he at 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 55 

once becomes paralysed in action and distorted 
in appearance. This may be true to life — indeed 
we all know how often it happens that when a 
man strays from the outer w r orld into Mr. Wal- 
pole's favourite enclosure he loses his identity and 
all that made him lovable or vital — but by making 
the less devour the greater it undoubtedly damps 
down the interest of the ordinary reader, and gives 
him a feeling of oppression. 

And the trouble is that Mr. Walpole himself 
seems only able to glimpse the real world of men 
and women through the medium of a mirror which 
is just as distorting as that of the Trenchards ! 
Our English " best people " are perhaps as incapable 
as were the Bourbons of learning anything or of 
forgetting anything. For them you are either 
"known," or you are a servant, or an "artist" 
(painter or back-haired musician), or else you " don't 
exist." When Mr. Walpole writes of people who 
don't belong to his world, he writes of those who 
really, for him, " do not exist " ; and he is unable 
to make them exist on paper. This inability, for 
which he is in no way to be blamed, has in the 
last few years received a peculiarly cruel exposure 
at the hand of Fate. What unlucky chance it was 
that sent Mr. Walpole to Russia, I do not know. 
Russia has been the grave of many reputations; 
and our Napoleon of the drawing-room novel has 



56 REPUTATIONS 

fared no better than other would-be conquerors of 
that disconcerting land. Events have treated him 
as cruelly as they treated Mr. Stephen Graham. 

In the light of what has happened in Russia 
within the past three years (disregarding for the 
moment all the details which are still in dispute) 
I think I can understand the reason for the 
paroxysms of rage into which The Secret City has 
thrown my Russian friends and acquaintances. 
For The Secret City gives us a glimpse of Petrograd 
as it might be reflected by Mr. Walpole's green 
mirror. The book is so confident, so knowledge- 
able, so perilously sure and efficient — in a word, so 
precisely like one of those Foreign Office reports 
on which our daily diplomatic blunders have for 
years past been based ! In Durward, Bohun and 
Lawrence we have three examples of our ruling 
class mentality. Durward and Bohun are pre- 
cisely alike, though Durward, who is the teller of 
the story (and a frightfully experienced and lofty 
personage), is constantly inviting his audience to 
laugh at Bohun's cocksureness. Lawrence is a little 
duller, is a little more solid and worthy than the 
other two, but just as much a slave of the " mirror." 
In these three men may be found the quintessence 
of almost all that is connoted by the word " Eng- 
lish " for the half- incredulous, half-furious foreigner ; 
and in reading about them one does not know 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 57 

whether to laugh or to cry. Mr. Walpole's three 
propagandists present the same ridiculous appear- 
ance as would Don Quixote in an aeroplane. On 
the surface, he himself seems aware of their ab- 
surdity. He laughs at them, but it is a complacent 
laughter — in short, it is an expression of that 
" Englishman's sense of humour " which is de- 
liberately calculated to cast a veil over all that is 
moving or terrible or true. For this sense of 
humour is the aristocratic Englishman's coat of 
mail. Nothing can penetrate it ; no cry of anguish 
from the " masses " can pierce it; nothing that is 
actual can touch it. In the old-fashioned, easy- 
going wars, before the discoveries of modern science 
had been turned to the purposes of destruction, it 
helped to make the English gentleman an inimitable 
figure — something unique in Europe. But its day 
is over, and what was once a virtue survives now 
only as a disastrous habit. One feels, in reading 
The Secret City, that Lord Milner (the most illus- 
triously misleading of the many observers sent out 
by us to report on Russian conditions) must have 
had a sense of humour no less acute than that of 
Mr. Walpole's propagandists. 

His Russian experiences were an unfair test of 
Mr. Walpole's mentality, intellectual equipment 
and powers of penetration. But perhaps, as a 
result of them, sooner or later the scales will fall 



58 REPUTATIONS 

from his eyes, he will suddenly become conscious, 
and he will heave a piece of rock through that 
green mirror which has till now enchanted and 
enchained him. As a novelist his manner is on the 
whole better than his matter ; yet one of his early 
stories, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, that memorable 
human drama, revealed in him qualities of which 
he has not since made use. This is a pity, for his 
later books — agreeable, even brilliant as they are 
— are studies only in stagnation. They introduce 
us to charming, limited, well-bred men and women, 
with distinguished manners, who have inherited a 
point of view which they are not strong enough or 
alive enough to disown. They are all immensely 
refined; but they have no fineness. To read 
about them is to go through the sensation of 
putting on one's high hat and grandpapa's Sunday 
trousers and making a call in Rutland Gate ! 
Perhaps it is not too late yet for Mr. Walpole to 
forget that past which lingers in the faded drawing- 
rooms of his Beaminsters and Trenchards and to 
wake up in the present. It is to be hoped so, for 
it is in to-day, and still more perhaps in to-morrow, 
that both romance and reality are to be found by 
those whose eyes are opened and who have been 
able to discard the distorting spectacles of our 
English " sense of humour." 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 59 



III. Gilbert Cannan 

The literary career of Mr. Gilbert Cannan, the 
bad boy of the Georgian novelists, has so far been 
much more exciting than that of either Mr. Wal- 
pole or Mr. Mackenzie, though perhaps less success- 
ful commercially. It has in many ways been an 
adventurous career, full of experiment and variety 
of endeavour — a tentative, groping, dissatisfied 
kind of career. Throughout it Mr. Cannan's 
worst enemy has been his own cleverness. In his 
life as an artist this cleverness has been his greatest 
danger; it has constantly tripped him up, inter- 
posed itself between him and his inspiration, and 
at times lured him into a display of mere mental 
gymnastics. 

Whereas Messrs. Mackenzie and Walpole have 
applied themselves almost exclusively to the 
business of producing fiction, Mr. Cannan has had 
a shot at nearly everything. He has experimented 
with the art of satire, written a treatise on it and 
produced a brilliant book called Windmills. He 
has written, with much gusto, an appreciation of 
Sam Butler. Then, in a moment of aberration, he 
has published a volume of unreadable love poems, 
now, happily, all sunk beneath the wave. Again, 
in another evil moment — bewitched, no doubt, by 



60 REPUTATIONS 

one of those " art " coteries which exist in London 
in such profusion — he has produced an " artistic " 
peasant play called Miles Dixon. It is written in 
that English equivalent of Kiltartan which Mr. 
Masefield first popularised in Nan, and reeks with 
the fumes of Cafe Royal consommations mas- 
querading as fresh air. But as if to atone for it, 
Mr. Cannan has also given us Inquest on Pierrot 
and Everybody' "s Husband. Then, in a different 
frame of mind, he has made an admirable trans- 
lation of Romain Rolland's Jean Cristophe. During 
the War, in an outburst of glorious indignation, he 
began a vast, sloppy Don Juanesque " epic in ten 
cantos " called Noel, which broke in like a gust of 
acrid laughter on the national self-complacency. 
This mood, unfortunately, was not continued. The 
War, instead of liberating him from his self- 
consciousness, his undue subjectivity, seems to 
have narrowed his outlook, impaired his mental 
equilibrium and upset his sense of values. Such 
novels as Pink Roses, Mummery and Time and 
Eternity are a running away from the intellectual 
conflict, a nervous defection. It is as though real 
life, with its bloody struggle on both the spiritual 
and material planes, had proved too much for his 
stomach. He withdrew from the fight, turned 
away from everything genuine and essential, and 
devoted his talent to describing those sub-human 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 61 

types who were able " to forget the War." The 
prostitutes, wasters and artistic riff-raff who figure 
in the three novels just mentioned make one wish 
to vomit, and it is only fair to suppose that they 
have much the same effect on their photographer. 
But Mr. Cannan has been unable to shake himself 
free from the delusion that such people are worth 
writing about. And he is unable even to write of 
them with detachment, but only with superiority. 
This superiority, and also his temporary blindness 
to values, are displayed lamentably in Time and 
Eternity. To stick one's fountain pen into this 
quivering, pathetic book would perhaps be inde- 
cently cruel. It is probably a result of war nerves, 
and one closes it with a feeling of intense depres- 
sion. It makes one hope that Mr. Cannan will go 
back to the provinces and give us again real 
human beings, if he cannot discover any in London, 
and if his imagination is unequal to the task of 
creating them. 

If one looks at Mr. Cannan's work as a whole, 
disregarding the three novels referred to above, 
which are the result of abnormal conditions, it will 
be seen that he has, in the past, touched life at 
many points, and has never for long allowed himself 
to remain in any intellectual rut. He has theories 
on the way things ought to be done, on the sort 
of plays which ought to be written, on politics 



62 REPUTATIONS 

and sociology. He has occasionally been attracted 
by movements and frequently seduced by ideas. 
And all these things, when he has digested them 
and distilled from them what he needs for his art, 
may eventually give him a place among the English 
novelists of lasting interest. His favourite ideas 
are frequently subversive. Very few of them 
would be considered quite respectable by the 
" dear Dean," who thinks so highly of Mr. Mackenzie 
and of Mr. Walpole. 

It is precisely Mr. Cannan's susceptibility to 
ideas, his restlessness and his dissatisfactions which 
combine to make him one of the most hopeful 
literary figures of to-day. All his experiments 
indicate that he is groping to find the heart of 
things, to discover what is real in human life, to 
catch a glimpse of the back of beyond. And in 
the past, at any rate, he has shown signs of being 
less complacent about the art of writing than many 
of his rivals. He has, perhaps, been on the watch 
to try to put off cleverness, and where his inspira- 
tion comes freshly from the heart, as in Round the 
Corner, and, in a less degree, in Old Mole and in 
Mendel, he largely (though not completely) succeeds 
in doing so. These three books, and passages in 
The Stucco House and Three Pretty Men, come 
through on their sincerity, and are made fragrant 
by flashes of human sympathy, imagination and 



THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS 63 

fancy which that sincerity has succeeded in 
liberating, 

Mr. Cannan is a writer who has yet to find himself, 
has yet to discover what it is that he can do best 
and, concentrating on that thing, to produce a 
work of art which shall fulfil all the promise which 
his various literary experiments have given so 
abundantly. The discovery once made, if he have 
only the strength of character to eschew versa- 
tility, he may find himself linked no longer with 
mere entertainers like Mr. Mackenzie, or with 
talented drawing-room novelists like Mr. Walpole, 
but recognised with Mr. D. H. Lawrence as one 
of the great novelists of the England of to-morrow. 
For Mr. Cannan is that now rare bird, an English- 
man conscious of his nationality. His voice is an 
English voice, and he has it in him to render 
articulate that which is most truly English in 
the thought of his time. 



THE LATER WORK OF 
D. H. LAWRENCE 



THE LATER WORK OF D. H. LAWRENCE 

When we look back on our first meeting with 
those people who in our lives have affected us most 
deeply, we have occasionally to reproach ourselves 
for what, in the light of later experiences, seems a 
shameful lack of perception on our part. We 
remember how we failed to appreciate immediately 
this or that person whom we now venerate — how 
we thought him a little dull. He was silent, per- 
haps, had no engaging small talk ; and his oddity, 
instead of intriguing us, was merely irritating. In 
short, on the occasion of that first encounter, which 
turned out later to have been an event of so much 
importance in our lives, we saw nothing in our 
future friend, and disliked the nothing that we saw. 
Then came the gradual change in our attitude, the 
belated realisation. But during the time it took 
us to reach the stage of understanding, in some 
degree, the complexities of the individual who at 
first baffled us or seemed repellent— but not of 
understanding them so well as to preclude the possi- 
bility of still further surprises — by how many 

67 



68 REPUTATIONS 

acquaintances, now scarcely remembered by name, 
were we not momentarily charmed? The man 
most worth knowing is, indeed, never quite know- 
able : there is something left over, something still 
in reserve, which maintains the bond unbroken. It 
is just the same with books as with persons. There 
are the books we skim, laugh at and throw away for 
ever ; and those which are forbidding and difficult, 
which reveal their beauties only if assiduously 
wooed and worked at, which for adequate apprecia- 
tion demand from their readers a period of brood- 
ing and digestion. And these are the books which, 
when it came to the point, we should probably 
take with us to that hypothetical desert island. 
They might not be the " hundred best," but they 
might easily turn out to be the hundred most aloof. 
Aloofness is certainly not the distinguishing 
quality of English letters at the present day. 
Indeed, there was perhaps never a time when our 
scribes were more uniformly ingratiating or struggled 
more desperately to please. No pretty lady or 
earnest young curate has ever approached some of 
our leading novelists and quill-drivers in the fervour 
of their desire to make a good impression. During 
the War period^ especially, the great mass of current 
literature cowered like a veritable Uriah Heep 
before public opinion, rubbing its hands with in- 
visible soft soap. Now it put on an alluring smile 



LATER WORK OF D. H. LAWRENCE 69 

and cracked on a top note of patriot " propaganda," 
now dropped a crocodile tear, now did a bit of 
" sunburstry " or provided a diverting display of 
verbal fireworks. Throw down a shilling and its 
one-man-bands would play you any tune you 
pleased. And even when it was naughty (for two 
shillings), it was oh ! so careful to show that all 
the time its heart was in the right place. Our 
literature and journalism, our writers and journal- 
ists seemed to strive, almost with one accord, to 
reflect every popular prejudice and to echo every 
popular banalite. There was scarcely to be found 
a single " conscientious objector " among them who 
had the pluck to follow his own road, giving the 
herd — in passing — a sound clump over its collective 
tete de mouton ! 

Among the exceptions to this generalisation — 
which is perhaps no more unjust than most — the 
name of Mr. D. H. Lawrence occurs immediately 
to the mind. No fawnings here, no parade of cheap 
attractions, no cadging from the crowd with a 
display of grease and grins ! Mr. Lawrence has 
always been obstinately himself; your kind favours 
will make no difference to him and are certainly 
not " solicited." 

From the occasion of his first appearance on the 
literary horizon Mr. Lawrence has been a difficult 
writer. He has never made any advances to the 



70 REPUTATIONS 

mob ; and even his prose style is a kind of barricade 
to prevent the intrusion of the many into the walled 
garden of his mind. At one time an additional 
barricade between his work and those who have 
subsequently appreciated his individual genius was 
erected by the " boosting " of a certain inner circle 
of the leaders of literary fashion. The very pecu- 
liarities of such early books as The White Peacock 
attracted this claque, with its flair for the less 
important phenomena of genius. For a little while 
they pretended to consider Mr. Lawrence the white 
hope of English letters; and they succeeded in 
making his books the vogue among a section of the 
London intelligentsia. It became the correct thing 
to admire Mr. Lawrence — until he suddenly applied 
the acid test of the value of these protestations and 
of this admiration by publishing The Rainbow. 
Then what a change of front ! The deafening 
silence, broken only by the sound of the white 
rabbits of criticism scuttling for cover, which 
formed the sequel to The Rainbow prosecution, will 
not soon be forgotten by those who were in London 
at the time. Not one of Mr. Lawrence's fervent 
boosters ventured into print to defend him; not 
one of his brother authors (save only Mr. Arnold 
Bennett, to whom all honour is due) took up the 
cudgels on his behalf. English novelists are 
proverbially lacking in esprit de corps, but surely 



LATER WORK OF D. H. LAWRENCE 71 

they were never so badly shown up as when they 
tolerated this persecution of a distinguished con- 
frere without making a collective protest. But our 
intelligentsia has always been more fickle and 
cowardly than the man in the street whom it so 
dearly loves to deride. All this is not to prove that 
The Rainbow is a satisfactory book. In many ways, 
irrespective of its fate, it is, as a work of art, per- 
haps one of the least successful novels which Mr. 
Lawrence has written, as it is the most ambitious. 
But if it must be called a failure, it is at all events a 
splendid and not an ignoble failure. 

The chief effect of The Rainbow affair on Mr. 
Lawrence seems to have been to cause him to retire 
more deeply into himself. His work has become 
more difficult, his peculiar transcendental philosophy 
more obscure. He has sought more and more to 
discard inessentials, to ignore the surface of things, 
until gradually he has released himself even from 
the unconscious nationalism of Sons and Lovers. 
In that most beautiful and perhaps immortal novel, 
he has shown us the very heart of the real England, 
the England which still has a heart. The book is 
full of the true English spirit, is fragrant with a 
love of England, is in the best sense national, so 
that it can hardly fail to reveal to the middle-class 
Imperialist " Britisher " who reads it the heart 
of the " English " Englishman. 



72 REPUTATIONS 

But in his last few volumes, Twilight in Italy, 
Look ! We Have Come Through ! and New Poems, 
and in a remarkable series of essays which he con- 
tributed to The English Review, Mr. Lawrence is 
concerned with humanity as a whole. He has 
transcended nationalism, and views the agonies 
inherent in the marriage of man's soul and body 
from the standpoint of his mystical philosophy. 
The argument of Look ! We Have Come Through ! 
sets forth a spiritual conflict at once individual and 
universal, a conflict of absorbing interest to any 
human being, regardless of creed or race, who has 
reached the stage of development necessary to its 
understanding. As a poet, he is concerned only 
with what is at the very core of human life, and 
thus his work — to borrow the phrase currently 
applied to pictures and statues of a certain kind — 
has always a " beyond " to it. All great poets, by 
the divine accident which we call inspiration, show 
us at moments, and often quite unconsciously, a 
glimpse of this beyond. Mr. Lawrence's moments 
of illumination (and perhaps this proves that in a 
strict sense he is not a " great poet ") are, however, 
never quite unconscious. He seems overwhelmed 
by what he has seen, to have seen more than he can 
possibly express, perhaps more than is expressible 
— in words. His quest is for the means to be articu- 
late. He strives, often with a kind of desperation, 



LATER WORK OF D. H. LAWRENCE 73 

to clothe his vision in words, and frequently his 
poems are battlefields on which he has been 
defeated. There are times, also, when he is like 
a man who has been blind, who is just recovering 
the use of his eyes and is convulsed with the effort 
to see a little more, a little further into the radiant 
world which is within an ace of being mira- 
culously restored to his vision. Now he has a 
sudden glimpse, and in a flash a new heaven and 
a new earth reveal themselves; but again, in a 
moment, all is chaos and obscurity, a veil of clouds 
and a rushing of waters. Thus the poems at the 
end of Look ! We Have Come Through ! called " New 
Heaven and Earth," " Elysium," " Manifesto," and 
" Craving for Spring," contain alternately passages 
of great sublimity which do indeed open windows in 
the mind, and passages of mere bathos and confusion. 
Of those who have the patience to read the book 
through, few, however, will miss the significance of 
lines such as these — 

" When I am trodden quite out, quite, quite out 
every vestige gone, then I am here 
risen, and setting my foot on another world 
risen, accomplishing a resurrection 

risen, not born again, but risen, body the same as before, 
new beyond knowledge of newness, alive beyond life 
proud beyond inkling or furthest conception of pride 
living where life was never yet dreamed of, nor hinted at 
here, in the other world, still terrestrial 
myself, the same as before, yet unaccountably new." 



74 REPUTATIONS 

Then comes the ecstasy of discovery — 

" Ha, I was a blaze leaping tip ! 
I was a tiger bursting into sunlight. 
I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown. 
I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb 
starved from a life of devouring always myself, 
now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching 

out 
and touching the unknown, the real unknown, 
the unknown unknown." 

In " Elysium " he returns to a favourite theme — 

" Delivered helpless and amazed 
From the womb of the All, I am waiting, dazed 
For memory to be erased. 

Then I shall know the Elysium 

That lies outside the monstrous womb 

Of time from out of which I come." 

" Manifesto," an effort to explain the author's 
sexual philosophy, seems to me to contain more 
confusion, mingled with commonplace ideas, than 
the other metaphysical poems, and to have fewer 
flashes of illumination. But as a statement of 
some of the cardinal points in Mr. Lawrence's belief, 
some passages in it have an obvious interest and 
value — 

" Let them praise desire who will, 
but only fulfilment will do, 
real fulfilment, nothing short. 



LATER WORK OF D. H. LAWRENCE 75 

It is our ratification 

our heaven, as a matter of fact. 

Immortality, the heaven, is only a projection of 

this strange but actual fulfilment, 
here in the flesh.' ' 

Many mystics have tried to deny sex altogether, 
but Mr. Lawrence sees in the bodily union of men 
and women the central mystery of human life, a 
mystery indissolubly connected with every real 
religious impulse of mankind, a symbol of an 
ultimate spiritual consummation. 

Perhaps the most profound and moving poem in 
this volume is the last one, " Craving for Spring." 
It is a passionate appeal to Life not to forsake the 
frozen and corrupt world, not to leave it under the 
dominion of Death. 

11 Come quickly, and vindicate us 
against too much death. 
Come quickly, and stir the rotten globe of the 

world from within, 
burst it with germination, with world anew. 
Come now, to us, your adherents, who cannot 

flower from the ice. 
All the world gleams with the lilies of Death the 

Unconquerable, 
but come, give us our turn. 
Enough of the virgins and lilies, of passionate, 

suffocating perfume of corruption, 
no more narcissus perfume, lily harlots, the blades 

of sensation 
piercing the flesh to blossom of death. 
Have done, have done with this shuddering, 



76 REPUTATIONS 

delicious business 

of thrilling ruin in the flesh, of pungent passion, 
of rare, death-edged ecstacy. 

Give us our turn, give us a chance, let our hour strike, 

O soon, soon ! 

Let the darkness turn violet with rich dawn. 

Let the darkness be warmed, warmed through to a ruddy- 
violet, 

incipient purpling towards summer in the world 
of the heart of man." 

There are people, perhaps, to whom the passage 
quoted above, and indeed the whole poem, may 
sound like the vapourings of a madman. To others 
it will sound like a kind of martial music of the 
soul, filling them with strange fervours and with 
unspeakable longing. 

When Mr. Lawrence drops the cloak of the seer 
and squeezes his individuality into the confines of 
more or less " ordinary" verse, he moves about with 
a power and confidence which few of his contem- 
poraries can equal. He comes down from meta- 
physics into the art of poetry, "trailing clouds of 
glory," and seems to see all the visible world with 
freshened eyes, and as if for the first time. Nature 
reveals her secrets to him as she has done to few 
poets and those only the most cherished. When 
he uses more or less conventional metres — as in the 
" Hymn to Priapus," in " A Youth Mowing," 
" Giorno dei Morti," " Sunday Afternoon in Italy," 
and the wonderful " Ballad of a Wilful Woman " — 



LATER WORK OF D. II. LAWRENCE 77 

he gives them always a personal, unconventional 
twist, and evolves a new, strange and beautiful 
music. The following verses from the " Ballad of 
a Wilful Woman " will serve to illustrate his use 
of metre — 

"While Joseph pitches the sleep -tent 
She goes far down to the shore 
To where a man in a heaving boat 
Waits with a lifted oar. 

• • • • 

They dwelt in a huge, hoarse sea-cave 
And looked far down the dark, 
Where an archway torn and glittering 
Shone like a huge sea-spark. 

He said : c Do you see the spirits 
Crowding the bright doorway ? 5 
He said : { Do you hear them whispering ? ' 
He said : c Do you catch what they say ? ' " 

The whole volume is full of brief, vivid, unfor- 
gettable pictures and images, like the following 
sketch of a type of young woman whom the poet 
calls " Frost flowers " — young women who — 

" dart and flash 
before the shops like wagtails on the edge of a pool." 

Or this, from a poem called " People " — 

" The great gold apples of night 
Hang from the street's long bough." 



78 REPUTATIONS 

And in the piece called " The Sea," Mr. Lawrence 
shows once again — as he showed in The Trespasser 
and in several of his other books — that he under- 
stands the sea as truly as the greatest of his 
country's poets, and that he feels for it something 
which only Englishmen seem to have been able to 
express. 

A good deal of Mr. Lawrence's later work, for 
reasons which have already been given, leaves 
the reader with a sense of disappointment. Some- 
times, when he strives hardest to liberate his ideas, 
he creates only the chaos which he has himself 
defined — 

" What is chaos, my love ? 
It is not freedom. 
A disarray of falling stars coming to nought. *' 

But how thankful we should be for the achieve- 
ment of this lonely genius ! Even when his verse 
is most chaotic, even when he most fails to set free 
his own thought and his poetry most nearly 
resembles " a disarray of falling stars," the sparks 
from the furnace of his inspiration retain sufficient 
heat to enable them to set fire to the minds on 
which they fall. 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 

When the average Englishman reads that some 
hundreds of his Indian fellow-citizens have been 
shot down by order of a British general officer, when 
he learns, from his morning paper, a few of the 
more lurid details of the behaviour of our military 
and bureaucratic Mandarins in Egypt, in Ireland, 
in Ceylon or Singapore, he feels, it is true, a 
momentary uneasiness. "I say, you know, this 
is going a bit far ! " But on the whole his view of 
the atrocities committed daily in his name is that 
somehow or another they must be all for the best. 
England, of course, is always right; she always 
has been, she always will be. "Leave it to the 
Army," " Leave it to the men at the top," leave 
it, in short, to any one you like except to comfort- 
able John Bull, who catches the five-fifteen every 
week-day afternoon and plays a round of golf 
religiously each Sunday. The mangled victims of 
England's mailed fist, when you come to think of 
it, are fairly certain to be criminals who richly 
deserve their fate. To sympathise too much with 
G 81 



82 REPUTATIONS 

the murdered would be unpatriotic, would, in fact, 
be " shaking hands with murder " ! And so the 
fun is allowed to continue, the volcano smokes 
ominously, but our good, easy folk sleep happily 
in their beds, resting after the tense emotions of 
five agonising years. It is the nemesis of every 
victory, this profound slumber of the victorious. 

But there is something more in our national 
apathy towards the deeds which are done in our 
name than mere spiritual numbness. There is a 
deeper cause even than the reaction after victory. 
It is to be found in that deliberate poisoning of the 
wells of human feeling, that organised campaign 
of lying and incitement to hatred (and thus to 
61 atrocity "), which began in August 1914 and 
continues even now, nearly two years after 
the cessation of hostilities. In this campaign our 
greatest newspapers have mobilised the ablest 
members of their staffs; in it, also, some of our 
most influential novelists and imaginative writers 
have engaged with all the energy and skill at their 
command. Even so, it would never have suc- 
ceeded as it did if the honest and the decent elements 
in the English writing fraternity had all united to 
oppose it. Had they spoken out instead of keep- 
ing silence, it is true they might not have " saved 
their skins," but they might have done something 
to clear our national good name of one of its 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 83 

darkest stains. And they might also have pre- 
served us from that disease of indifference which 
has caused a nation as sound at heart as our own 
to allow its irresponsible Government to murder 
millions of poor people by a misuse of the Blockade. 
To go over in one's mind the names of the men 
who have been prominent in British war journalism 
is calculated to give any honest man a respect 
neither for Britain nor for its journalists. To 
many men of the younger generation who fought 
in the War, it now seems incredible that during 
their absence the inciters to hatred and slaughter 
could ever have contrived to get such a strangle- 
hold on public opinion. The " Pacifists " are not 
similarly bewildered. We know that they were 
able to do it by battening on the terrors and pre- 
judices inevitably occasioned by warfare, and by 
inflaming the passions of the mob by atrocity stories 
and distorted news. And we know that they were 
also able to do it because of the active help, or the 
tacit connivance, of the men whose reputations as 
leaders of thought or as national spokesmen stood 
highest with the community. 

Insurgent youth is not going to waste its time 
denouncing the "arm-chair" militarists. It is 
probable that many of these were quite honest and 
sincere; at all events, they did not sin against the 
light. But what is to be said of the " intellec- 



84 REPUTATIONS 

tuals," the sham progressives, the Higher Thinkers 
who throughout the War yoked themselves tamely 
to the capitalist-driven car of State, took Govern- 
ment jobs, and regularly — from the democratic 
standpoint — sold every pass? Had these men 
possessed sufficient moral courage they could soon 
have made the Censorship unworkable. Not even 
the Coalition could have continued with all the 
organs of Radical opinion closed down and all the 
exponents of Radical ideas silenced or in gaol. Had 
there been any real show of resistance, any real 
backbone among our leading democratic publicists, 
Mr. George and his confreres would have been com- 
pelled to make some concessions to the national 
sense of decency. I am not speaking now as a 
" defeatist." I believe that such concessions would 
in no way have impaired the efficient conduct of 
the War, while they would certainly have improved 
the chances of a clean and democratic settlement. 
And if, by the courageous expression of Liberal 
principles, we had given the German moderates 
something better to hope for than the " knock-out 
blow," there is little reason to doubt that they 
would have been able to exert such pressure on their 
Government as would have resulted in the ending 
of the War many months earlier than November 
1918. A little courage, a little resolute plain- 
speaking, and not only might thousands, perhaps 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 85 

millions of lives have been saved, but the world 
might have been preserved from that nightmare of 
horror, that frightful menace to our entire civilisa- 
tion which has been secretly concocted in Paris 
and blasphemously labelled " Peace." 

No, it is not the war-records of our " yellow " 
journalists that the youth of England will concern 
itself to examine, but the records of those who 
before the outbreak of the War were accounted our 
leaders in the struggle towards progress. How 
have these leaders acquitted themselves ? Can we 
trust them any more? What have they done for 
us? Do they deserve our continued allegiance, 
or have they forced us to disown them ? 

Such men as Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold 
Bennett, John Galsworthy, G. K. Chesterton, 
Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, W. L. George, 
Evelyn Sharp, E. D. Morel, Norman Angell, Gilbert 
Cannan, Hilaire Belloc, J. C. Squire — to take a 
handful of prominent names at random — will 
doubtless be separated by the historian, abruptly 
and without peradventure, into two groups. In the 
first will come those who maintained unblemished 
their intellectual honesty, who faced loss of income, 
persecution and even imprisonment rather than 
compromise with the truth as they saw it or allow 
themselves to be intimidated into silence. In the 
second category will be placed those who ratted 



86 REPUTATIONS 

from the intellectual conflict, who made war 
profits out of the nation's peril, lent their aid to 
Government propaganda, and encouraged either 
actively (or by their silence) all those evils of ram- 
pant militarism from which the common people of 
the British Empire are now everywhere suffering. 

When I say that these eminent writers will be 
divided without peradventure into two groups, I 
really mean by St. Peter or some other heavenly 
archivist who has their complete dossiers in 
front of him. Their fallible juniors, anxious to 
discover whom they can trust to help them during 
the years of danger and difficulty which lie ahead, 
can only do their imperfect best to arrive at just 
conclusions. If their judgments involve the 
rejection of individuals, then at least it is incumbent 
upon them to treat their lost leaders as leniently as 
possible. The history of human progress is, alas, 
studded with the names of " lost leaders," of terri- 
fied teachers dissociating themselves hastily from 
the taught. " Just for a handful of silver he left 
us, just for a ribband to stick in his coat," is the 
sort of reproach which has been levelled times with- 
out number against men whose speeches or whose 
writings once influenced insurgent youth. Alas, it 
is a well-known failing of those who preach revolu- 
tionary doctrines to desert their disciples at the first 
hint of danger. And now that the War is over and 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 87 

the red waves of democracy are everywhere rolling 
forward — inevitably, inexorably, like the oncoming 
of a great tide — there is a temptation to indulge in 
bitterness, and to long for revenge against men 
who, whether as writers or as politicians, seem to 
have betrayed their trust. But an era of world 
brotherhood will not be ushered in by hanging 
Lord Northcliffe from a lamp-post in Carmelite 
Street, or by dealing faithfully with men who have 
disappointed some of their followers as profoundly 
as Mr. H. G. Wells. The problem before the 
Socialist is rather one of analysing the intellectual 
development of those who were his teachers, and of 
finding out how far, in the new world period which 
lies ahead of us, he can continue to accept their 
message. For we can no longer afford to be 
hypnotised, as we were so often in the past, by the 
sound of an illustrious name. No public in the 
world remains so faithful to the individuals whom 
it has once decided to honour as the British public, 
and this fidelity is at once a virtue and a vice. In 
so far as it springs from intellectual laziness it is 
purely a vice, and a dangerous vice, dangerous both 
to the eminent and to their admirers. 

Among the leaders of democratic thought in 
England during the past twenty-five years, no 
individual has been more prominent, or more justly 
acclaimed than Mr. H. G. Wells. Perhaps no other 



88 REPUTATIONS 

writer, with the exception of Mr. Bernard Shaw, has 
exerted a more profound and widespread influence 
on the minds of the younger generation of English 
men and women. The debt which all thinking 
people in this country owe to Mr. Wells is so great 
that, regardless of his war record (whatever St. Peter 
may think of it), nobody with a spark of generosity 
in his composition can fail to acknowledge it with 
gratitude. But there are dangers in allowing this 
gratitude to enslave our intelligence. The ques- 
tion must be asked by International Socialists at 
this juncture whether Mr. Wells is for them or 
against them. And if he should declare himself on 
their side, they have to ask themselves further 
whether they can trust him any longer. 

During the War Mr. Wells occupied a special, an 
almost unique position. Unlike Mr. Shaw, who has, 
like the prophets, always made a practice of saying 
five years in advance what the majority of intelli- 
gent people will eventually accept as the truth, 
Mr. Wells has interpreted the best thought current 
in England at particular moments, in a manner 
capable of immediate acceptance by large sections 
of our population. Thus, during the past six 
years he might, in a very intimate sense, have 
become our national spokesman. He might have 
crystallised, more effectively even than President 
Wilson, the vague hopes and desires of decent 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 89 

" plain people." He needed but courage in order 
to reveal to innumerable simple souls what they 
really, at the bottom of their hearts, thought and 
felt. 

Throughout his career Mr. Wells has been a 
voluminous publicist. He is a Republican, and for 
a time he was one of the shining lights of the 
Fabian Society. That conflict between capital and 
labour the existence of which the collapse of the 
enemy has now made clear, even to the densest 
minds among us, has occupied his attention for 
years. And, before August 1914, for at least a 
decade, young men and women in this country had 
imbibed from Mr. Wells hatred of war, distrust of 
that capitalism which is the chief underlying cause 
of war, distrust of monarchy, imperialism, British 
educational methods, politicians, and our higher 
bourgeoisie. No one had given more encourage- 
ment than Mr. Wells to the growing tendency 
towards iconoclasm, towards breaking up as a 
prelude to rebuilding. The seeds of those ideas 
which under the red flag of the International are 
now everywhere gaining acceptance were widely 
sown by him in pre-war England. His novel The 
World Set Free, in which, in the spring of 1914, he 
foretold the World War, must have " converted " 
many of the young men and women who, when the 
War actually broke out, formed the backbone of the 



90 REPUTATIONS 

International Socialist party in England. By 
awakening the consciences of large numbers of his 
readers in regard to the ethics of mutual murder and 
capitalist exploitation, he did more than any other 
Englishman to produce that essentially English 
product, the " conscientious objector." (For the 
conscientious objector was merely the British bull- 
dog biting on an idea, instead of — at the word of 
command — biting on the seat of the other fellow's 
breeches.) 

When war broke out, while many of Mr, Wells' 
disciples were keeping alight the flame of those 
principles which by his eloquence he had instilled 
into their minds, Mr. Wells himself, like the majority 
of us, completely lost his head. At one moment he 
was urging all the middle-aged gentlemen living 
in the country to clean their rook-rifles so that, 
w T hen the Hun invaded, they might lurk behind 
hedges and bag at least a victim apiece before their 
women were raped — regardless of the fact that, 
according to those laws of warfare which we 
observed so faithfully in South Africa, such a pro- 
ceeding would have justified the Germans in burn- 
ing every village they entered. This emotional 
episode, in giving us the clue to Mr. Wells' character, 
at the same time makes any bitterness we might 
be tempted to feel towards him unjustifiable. But 
it also shows us how completely, as an intellectual 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 91 

leader, he is untrustworthy. For Mr. Wells is a 
man of genius with a temperament : and allow- 
ances must be made for his temperament. He has 
not, one suspects, the moral and intellectual 
courage of a Bertrand Russell or a Bernard Shaw, 
because he does not possess their self-control. He 
is not one whom we could reasonably expect to 
die like Giordano Bruno, or even to put himself 
within reach of Dora. His great virtues are his 
sensitiveness to ideas, his eager scanning of the 
future, his belief in and love for humanity, his 
imagination, and his ability — at his best moments — 
to combine emotional warmth with a scientific 
clarity. The value of his political writings has 
lain always in their suggestiveness. He has the 
knack of starting trains of thought in his readers' 
minds. What it is that he is suggesting perhaps 
very often he does not himself realise, and would 
endeavour to counteract if he did. He does not 
deliver a gospel ; he pours out the raw material for 
several contradictory gospels. It is for those who 
read him to select from his work what is of value to 
them and resolutely to reject the rest. 

If the war has not displayed Mr. Wells in the 
light of a hero, it has at least revealed him as an 
honest and lovable human being, intensely emo- 
tional, compounded of wisdom and folly, of faults 
and virtues like the rest of us, but with, on the 



92 REPUTATIONS 

whole, a bias towards such things as are decent, 
humane and democratic. 

His war books reflected current opinion, but did 
not form it. Mr. Britling Sees it Through was a 
brilliant exposition of that first awakening from 
intellectual numbness which took place in England 
after the first year of the War. The book did not 
bring about this awakening, it recorded it. It was 
published at precisely the right moment and was 
an immense success. The Soul of a Bishop, which 
followed it, reflected in an eminently prudent 
manner that half-wistful re-examination of the 
" Sermon on the Mount " which was occupying 
the minds of religious people during the period 
just preceding the Lloyd George-Northcliff e alliance, 
when Peace was a possibility. The point of the 
book was so carefully wrapped up that the majority 
of Mr. Wells' library subscribers and none, appar- 
ently, of his reviewers, were able to perceive it. 
But it was there. The book interpreted what was 
in the minds of a number of inarticulate people 
whose religious feeling was leading them towards a 
demand for peace. 

With the arrival of Mr. Lloyd-George's " knock- 
out " Coalition of politicians and pressmen, there 
came a fresh and more violent inundation of " hate " 
journalism. The tired passions of the mob were 
violently whipped-up. A return to the " War 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 93 

Spirit " was preached in the columns of the great 
newspapers; and the people responded. Victory 
was in sight ! One more effort ! Another million 
men ! Even transcendental pacifism now meant 
danger for a popular author. The award for plain 
speaking and clear thinking was gaol, exile or, at 
least, financial loss. And never was there a period 
when the purveyors of higher thought occupied 
themselves more desperately with the safety and 
comfort of the higher thinker. 

Mr. Wells might at this time have done some- 
thing to stop the rot, had he possessed the qualities 
essential in a leader. Not possessing these quali- 
ties he once again acted as a " reflector." He 
crystallised the ideas of our middle classes, but he 
crystallised (and it is due to him to say it) not their 
worst ideas, but their best. How bad these were can 
be seen by any one who cares to study Joan and 
Peter. Perhaps Mr. Wells himself was uneasy and 
dissatisfied, because this portentously long and jaded 
novel marks the lowest intellectual level which he 
has yet touched. On every page it shows lament- 
able signs of " middle-age Spread." He is unable 
to discard the role of popular educator — the book 
contains perhaps 500 pages of Wellsian discourse 
to 250 of story — but he has fled from the task of 
educating the people about the one subject which 
agitates their minds. The darkness of war brood- 



94 REPUTATIONS 

ing over the whole land is only made darker by 
him. His pages contain no " light " in the sense in 
which readers of Henri Barbusse will understand 
that word. His book merely reflects the misery 
and bewilderment which afflicted the crowd. Amid 
the horror and desolation caused by a bankrupt 
social system, at the end of a world period when a 
civilisation was breaking itself to pieces in the 
most outrageously unjust war known to history, 
Mr. Wells consecrated his enormous novel to 
enshrining and amplifying this profound conclu- 
sion : " a world whose schools are unreformed is 
an unreformed world ! " On the delineation of the 
maker of this aphorism, an Empire-builder named 
Oswald Sydenham, he has lavished particular care, 
but it is difficult to believe in this latest edition 
of the " strong, silent Englishman." In real life 
Empire-builders are usually strong, silent bores, 
with tropical livers, whose occasional eruptions of 
speech will empty a smoking-room in the dullest 
club in London inside fifteen minutes. 

Mr. Wells' Empire-builder has a bee in his bonnet 
which buzzes loudly — educational reform. The 
author gives him Joan and Peter on whom to 
practise his theories, and apparently expects us 
to admire the result; typical Public Schoolboy, 
typical Public Schoolgirl. Indeed, Mr. Wells seemed 
to have discovered the " English gentleman " at 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 95 

the very moment when the more clear-sighted of 
his compatriots were beginning to find him out. 

One of the most depressing things about this 
novel was the way it showed how completely Mr. 
Wells had lost touch with youth. For the quality 
of youth is not a thing which can be reckoned in 
terms of years. The average English Public School- 
boy — Peter, in whom Mr. Wells takes so much 
paternal pride, exemplifies this lamentably — 
acquires in his schooldays a middle-aged outlook, 
and seldom succeeds in setting free the spirit of 
youth imprisoned within him except by a difficult 
process of rejections and rebellions. But Peter can 
neither reject nor rebel, and except for the fact that 
he is a rather more lamentable prig than the average 
boy unhampered by an Empire-building guardian 
with a sense of mission, he belongs precisely to the 
type which the English Public Schools have for 
generations turned out in tens of thousands. 
An England of Peters will certainly remain an 
unreformed England. 

It is difficult even to be impressed by Peter's 
moralisings in hospital (he is an airman and gets 
wounded) about God, whom he describes as " the 
old Experimenter." They are just as trite, just 
as second-hand and shoddy as were those of the 
boys who read the leading articles in the news- 
papers instead of — as, presumably, was the case 



96 REPUTATIONS 

with Peter — the lyric pages of God the Invisible 
King. The only thing in Peter's favour is that he 
did not apparently read the verses of Rupert 
Brooke and decide to turn himself into a " soldier 
poet." 

Joan is a more likeable and slightly less stereo- 
typed figure than Peter ; but as a product of educa- 
tional reform she is pathetic. If this is all we are 
likely to be able to achieve in our efforts to pull 
ourselves together, we had better commit race- 
suicide and have done with it. For Joan also is 
the pre-war product. As the heroine of a feuilleton 
called " The Soul of a Waac," she would be perfect. 
It is only when we think of her as the potential 
mother of those Englishmen of to-morrow who are 
going to revive our best traditions that our hearts 
sink. Alas, she is, from the point of view of the 
capitalist press, with its debased standard of values, 
" splendid." 

One can imagine her (she is a chauffeur in the 
Waacs) driving General Dyer to his Amritsar battue 
with as much ecstasy as if she were driving the 
Almighty to St. Paul's Cathedral. One cannot 
imagine her worrying her head about the ethics of 
shooting down unarmed Indians. Certainly one 
cannot imagine her, in an access of rebellious rage, 
driving General Dyer into the ditch. But unless 
educational reform in England is going to turn 



MR. WELLS AND THE WAR 97 

English boys and girls into rational human beings 
capable of generous indignation, incapable of mean 
and sentimental acquiescence, it will not save us, 
and it will not be reform. 

It is a relief to turn from the Mr. Wells of the 
last stages of the War to another Mr. Wells, the 
author of passages such as this : "At first I was 
extraordinarily excited by my baptism of fire. 
Then, as the heat of the day came on, I experienced 
an enormous tedium and discomfort. ... I kept 
thinking of the dead Prussian down among the 
corn and of the bitter outcries of my own men. 
Damned foolery ! It was damned foolery. But who 
was to blame ? How had we got to this ? . . . 

' From Holland to the Alps this day, 5 1 thought, 
1 there must be crouching and lying between half 
and a million of men, trying to inflict irreparable 
damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to 
the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently 
I shall wake up. . . .' 

; Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. 
' Presently mankind will wake up.' 

c I lay speculating just how many thousands of 
men there were, among these hundreds of thousands, 
whose spirits were in rebellion against all these 
ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren't we 
perhaps already in the throes of the last crisis, 
in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror 



98 REPUTATIONS 

before the sleeper will endure no more of it — and 
wakes ? " 

Mr. Wells has been talking to returned soldiers, 
you think, and I have stolen into his study and 
transcribed some lines from the MS. of a forth- 
coming novel ? Not a bit of it. The passage I have 
quoted was published in the spring of 1914. In 
the ghastly intervening years many millions of 
people have c * woken up " from their nightmare. 
The questions postulated by the war have been 
answered by a great cry of rebellion from millions 
of human hearts. And Mr. Wells, who had the 
imagination to realise in advance both questions and 
answers, has Mr. Wells gone to sleep ? If he has, 
mindful of his many services to humanity, the least 
we can do is to leave him undisturbed. When he 
wakes again he will see the forces he once led far 
in front of him, rushing to attack ; and he will have 
all his work cut out if he wishes to catch them up. 
If, panting after them, he cries " Stop ! stop — I 
am one of your leaders," it is to be hoped that 
they will not delay their advance to listen. For, 
unlike the warfare of guns and tanks, the warfare 
of ideas cannot be conducted from the rear. 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 






THE WAR AND THE POETS 

Not the least curious among the minor pheno- 
mena of the World War was the flood of war verse, 
by " soldier poets " and others, which found its 
way into print in England after the lamented death 
of Rupert Brooke. Poetry, we were assured, was 
booming. Lying about in every smart London 
drawing-room you would find the latest little volume, 
and at every fashionable bookshop the half-crown 
war poets were among the " best selling lines." 
We were asked to believe that the European War — 
unlike all its predecessors known to history, not one 
of which has ever inspired any art worth mentioning 
— had really brought to light a wealth of poetic 
talent. The publishers, faced by the problem of 
the paper shortage and the resulting necessity of 
selling very small books at very high prices if they 
were to make two ends meet, naturally did their 
bit towards encouraging " the muse in arms." 
The literary gentlemen who sat in their armchairs 
and rhapsodised — in the interests of propaganda 

— about the beauties of war, aided and abetted them 

101 



102 REPUTATIONS 

with real fervour. An atmosphere was quickly 
and easily created favourable to the sale of verse, 
and the always gullible English public, flattered by 
the remarks in the Press about its " revived interest 
in poetry," disbursed its shillings with a lavishness 
only equalled by its lack of discrimination. 

There remained, however, a few obstinate people 
who declined to allow their critical faculties to be 
chloroformed by popular sentiment, who continued 
to believe that although death on the field of 
battle might gain for the hero instant admission to 
Valhalla, it was not necessarily a qualification for 
Parnassus. Such ironsides clung to the notion 
that it is quality, not quantity, which makes a golden 
age of literature. And looked at from their point 
of view, it must be admitted that the influence which 
the Great War has had on the art of poetry seems 
to have been as unfortunate as its influence on the 
sister art of criticism. 

The English war poets appear to divide them- 
selves roughly into three sections. The first, and 
by far the largest section, includes the work of 
subalterns, fresh from the Public Schools, whose 
verse is as second-hand and as imitative in form as 
in sentiment. Then come the few from whom the 
tragedy of the years since 1914 has wrung a real 
cri de cceur, an honest statement of emotional 
experience in verse form. Finally we have the 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 103 

older professional poets and the journalists in verse, 
who have " carried on " as best they might. 

If any student of English life wishes to gain an 
insight into the real meaning of the Public School 
spirit, that poisonous anachronism on which our 
country still prides herself, he cannot do better 
than study a handful out of the countless volumes 
of war verse which it has produced. For our Public 
School system, in its effort to turn out every little 
Englishman " a thoroughly manly young fellow," 
succeeds brilliantly in stunting the growth of his 
thinking apparatus. It preserves him as an in- 
tellectual adolescent living in a fairyland of chival- 
rous illusion, with a blind trust in the doctrines 
enunciated by the reactionary newspapers. Many 
of these Public Schoolboy soldiers must have gone 
straight from the cricket-field and the prefect's 
study to the trenches, in a kind of waking dream. 
Their mental equipment for withstanding the shock 
of experience was as useless as the imitation suit 
of armour, the dummy lance and shield of the actor 
in a pageant. It was their false conception of life, 
their inability to look at facts except through tinted 
glasses of one particular colour, which rendered 
the poems of so many young subalterns so value- 
less as literature, so tragic and accusing as 
human documents. For they accuse the age which 
permitted and gloried in an educational system 



104 REPUTATIONS 

so monstrously unfair to its victims, and they 
accuse the schoolmasters who have acquiesced in 
perpetuating it. 

I quote the lines which follow because they are 
eminently characteristic of the note of scores of 
books of the kind to which I have just referred. 
They were picked out for special praise by one of 
our head masters, in an issue of The Poetry Review — 

" Malvern men must die and kill, 
That wind may blow on Malvern Hill ; 
Devonshire blood must fall like dew, 
That Devon's bays may yet be blue; 
London must spill out lives like wine, 
That London's lights may ever shine." 

This is precisely the doctrine of the " You-go- 
first " or " Comb-them-all-out-except-me " press, 
accepted with a blind and touching credulity, and 
it is certainly not intended to be the scarifying 
satire which, in effect, it is. It is the kind of thing 
which during the War was accepted as poetry, even 
by a journal ostensibly devoted to that art; which 
the reviewers chose for commendation, and the 
reading public presumably appreciated. 

For the second section into which I have divided 
the war poets — the section containing those who 
have something to say, and therefore the only one 
that really matters — I must confess I have found 
only a very small group who claim admittance. 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 105 

Alan Seeger, Wilfred Sorley, and one or two others 
were moved at moments to sincerity, and some 
honest and effective verse has been written by 
Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Osbert 
Sitwell. 

Of these three Robert Graves is the most fanciful, 
the least introspective and reflective, the least 
savage. His poem, " It's a Queer Time," strikes 
his characteristic note of whimsical resignation. 
It is a curiously touching poem, and in places 
curiously vivid — 

11 Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out — 
A great roar — the trench falls and shakes about — 
You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . . hullo ! 
Elsie conies tripping gaily down the trench, 
Hanky to nose — that lyddite makes a stench — 
Getting her pinafore all over grime. 
Funny ! Because she died ten years ago ! 
It's a queer time." 

Mr. Graves has a gentle voice, naturally gay and 
cheerful, and always his own. He does not probe 
or question; when the actual becomes unbearable 
he flies away on the wings of his fancy. Mr. Sassoon, 
on the other hand, deals chiefly with the actual. 
His verse is wrought out of the stuff of life, and 
throughout it all is heard a cry of agony, an agony 
of compassion. He has not a trace of Mr. Graves' 
resignation. Indeed the natural rage of a sensitive 
man at the horrors and stupidity of war — which 



106 REPUTATIONS 

but for the blight of tradition must have found a 
thousand eloquent voices — seems, as far as I can 
discover, to have been interpreted most powerfully 
in English verse by Mr. Sassoon. In prose 
there are many moving passages in the books of 
Sir Philip Gibbs and Mr. Patrick MacGill and, 
among continental writers, in those of Andreas 
Latzko, Duhamel, Henri Barbusse. But of all 
the war poets whose little volumes were recently 
so much in evidence Mr. Sassoon was one of the 
few who had the courage and the sincerity to try 
to show the War as it was and to utter, not 
innocuous sentiments, but horrifying truths. And 
in his poems may, I think, be detected a throwing- 
off of the mouldy and decrepit " Public School 
tradition " ; an assertion of human brotherhood ; a 
reaching out towards that New World which so 
many have died to render different from the old. 

Mr. Sassoon sees war stripped of all its taw T dry 
gilding, sees it in all its beastliness, in all its futility, 
in all its pathos. And contrasted with the realities 
with which every soldier soon became familiar, he 
notes with bewilderment the unctuous flapdoodle 
let loose on an illusion-loving public at home by its 
daily comforter, the Press; the bleatings of the 
bishops; the blow-the-Bosche-to-bits and fight- 
till-the-last-combed-out-conscript-falls attitude of 
profiteering patriots. Here is the end of a poem 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 107 

called " In the Pink," which illustrates his com- 
passion and his irony — 

" He couldn't sleep that night. Still in the dark 
He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm, 
When he'd go out as cheerful as a lark 
In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm 
With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear 
The simple, silly things she liked to hear. 

And then he thought : to-morrow night we trudge 
Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten. 
Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge 
And everything but wretchedness forgotten. 
To-night he's ' in the pink,' but soon he'll die, 
And still the war goes on, he don't know why." 

The poet's exasperation at the refusal of the 
respectable people at home, who ran the War and 
were so chatty about " our brave lads," to realise 
anything at all about the terrors, hopes, and suffer- 
ings of the men whose blood for nearly four years 
soaked the soil of France, shows itself again and 
again in this book, and in its successor, Counter- 
Attack. (In Counter -Attack Mr. Sassoon develops a 
vein of satire which might be expected to pierce 
even the brass armour of a " Galloper Smith " !) 

Mr. Sassoon's verse has found favour with his 
fellow-soldiers, and also with the more human and 
imaginative sections of the English public. But the 
great mass of English " patriots," wedded to their 
illusions as closely as to their war profits, have found 



108 REPUTATIONS 

him decidedly uncomfortable reading. " Ah, poor 
fellow!" they said, "his brain must be unhinged 
by all that he has been through." And then they, 
or rather their womenkind, turned hastily, turned 
with relief, to the " fine sanity " of Mr. John Drink- 
water. No one could better act as a sedative after 
the nervous shock of reading " unhinged " dealers 
in truth like Mr. Siegfried Sassoon than Mr. Drink- 
water. Soothed by his mellifluous strains, half the 
old ladies who went to Bath to avoid the air raids 
slid gently into their post-prandial nap — 

" I sing of peace who have known the large unrest, 
Of men bewildered in their travelling, 
And I have known the Bridal earth unblest 
By the Brigades of Spring." 

That was the kind of cc unrest," the kind of 
" knowledge " for which the illusion-loving mind 
craved in war-time. It was distinctly less nerve- 
racking than such an odious, undraped confronta- 
tion with the actual as that provided, for example, 
by Mr. Sassoon's poem " They " — 

" The Bishop tells us : * When the boys come back 
They will not be the same; for they'll have fought 
In a just cause.' " 

The Bishop develops his platitudes. And then — 

" ' We're none of us the same ! ' the boys reply. 

'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind; 
Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die; 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 109 

And Bert's gone syphilitic; you'll not find 

A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.' 

And the Bishop said : ' The ways of God are strange ! '" 

Whether Mr. Sassoon, as a poet, has much staying 
power, or whether he has said already all that he 
has to say, time alone can show. The work which 
he has published up to the present leaves the 
question unanswered. It constitutes a fine achieve- 
ment; but it makes no promises. 

This cannot be said of the verse in Mr. Osbert 
SitwelFs Argonaut and Juggernaut, which is full of 
" promise." In this volume we find traces of an 
all-too-rare gift of satire — a satire directed chiefly 
against the aged armchair warriors on the home 
front and their women — allied with a queer, 
luxuriant imagination. Mr. Sitwell is deliberately 
impatient of the restraints of metre, but these 
restraints seem rather to suit his temperament, and 
his work is at its best when he submits to them. 
Mr. Sitwell is a poet who happened to endure the 
War ; but he is not (like Mr. Sassoon) a " war poet." 
His greatest danger lies, perhaps, in his facility, and 
the test of his capacity will come when in a 
literary verse he gets — or fails to get — his " second 
wind." 

The professional poets and the journalist verse- 
writers who" dealt with " the War in the ordinary 
course of business, maintained a fairly respectable 



110 REPUTATIONS 

level of literary merit, but it cannot be said that the 
War inspired them to surpass themselves. Among 
the younger men, Mr. Robert Nichols, who had the 
advantage of a fair technical equipment, achieved 
a popular success with his much-praised Ardours 
and Endurances. After his experiences in the 
trenches he tried nobly to rise to the occasion, and 
his poem " The Assault " is the principal result of 
his efforts. Considered in cold blood, however, 
it is an empty and pretentious piece of work, too 
laboured, too patently worked out in accordance 
with some brand-new " stuntist " theory to be at all 
impressive. The dabs and splashes of colour, the 
onomatopoeic rendering of gunfire, fail to interest, 
because the thought underlying the poem is com- 
monplace. (In a year or two, if the human race is 
to continue at all, let us hope it will have become an 
absurd memory.) 

" Ha ! Ha ! Bunched figures waiting. 
Revolver levelled quick ! 
Flick ! Flick ! 
Red as blood. 
Germans. Germans. 
Good ! O good ! 
Cool madness." 

It was characteristic of our war-time criticism 
that this masterpiece of drivel, instead of exciting 
derision, was hailed as a work of genius and read 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 111 

with avidity. On the whole Mr. Nichols is much 
more sincere and more effective when he is writing 
about other things than war, and occasionally, as 
in his poem " The Tower," he achieves beauty of 
atmosphere and description. 

Captain Gilbert Frankau's war poems are topical ; 
they are smart, descriptive journalism done into 
the slickest modern verse, and their competence 
lifts them head and shoulders above ninety per 
cent, of the verse of his brothers in arms. Captain 
Frankau's talents are considerable and under 
perfect control, so that whether he is writing about 
night clubs or trench-lights he is always, as the 
pressmen say, " in the news." He does not attempt 
to be profound. 

Perhaps the real test of the influence of the war 
on recent poetry — an influence alleged by our 
sentimentalists to have been so profoundly inspiring 
and invigorating — is to be found, not in a study of 
the younger men, but in an examination of the 
output during the period of hostilities, of the older 
poets whose reputations, in 1914, were already 
established. Did the War actually infuse fresh 
energy into our surviving Victorian or Edwardian 
singers? If it did, the masterpieces have been 
cruelly withheld from a public all agog to receive 
them. 

William Watson, it is true, wrote a sonnet to Lord 



112 REPUTATIONS 

Northcliffe and one or two other pieces inspired by 
current events. He received a knighthood, but his 
literary reputation has not thereby been increased. 
Rudyard Kipling exhibited the bankruptcy of his 
point of view in several archaic bleats, so feeble 
in thought and style that a practical joker was 
easily able to hoax one of the leading newspapers 
into publishing a burlesque of them. And yet, 
in the piping days of peace, it was Kipling who, 
more successfully than any other writer, preached 
the gospel of commercial and militarist Imperialism 
in Great Britain ! Mr. John Masefield, whom one 
might have imagined the smell of blood would have 
intoxicated, produced nothing of literary importance, 
but threw himself with fervour into propagandist 
journalism intended for consumption in America. 
Mr. Hardy gave us a few morose and gloomy 
verses ; Mr. Bridges, our Poet Laureate, showed signs 
of marked discomfort at the realisation of the part 
he was expected to play; and several other great 
ones attempted the top note and cracked on it 
badly. A survey of the poetic output during the 
War of the established English poets forces one to 
the conclusion that only those who — like Mr. de la 
Mare and Mr. D. H. Lawrence — deliberately kept 
their minds and thoughts on a higher plane, man- 
aged to escape its vulgarising influence. During 
the last year of the War three volumes of new verse 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 113 

by well-known writers made their appearance— 
Motley, and Other Poems, by Walter de la Mare, 
Look ! We Have Come Through ! by D. H. Lawrence, 
and On Heaven, and other Poems, by Ford Madox 
Hueffer. Of these three poets, I believe only Mr. 
Hueffer served in the trenches. It is an unfortunate 
fact that of the three it is his work alone which 
shows marked signs of deterioration. On Heaven, 
and other Poems— the only volume which has come 
from Mr. Hueffer's pen for some time— is a sad 
descent, at any rate so far as the war verses in it are 
concerned, from the general level of his Collected 
Poems. Somehow, in putting on khaki, he seems, 
like so many other men in the early forties, to have 
resumed, as far as possible, the outlook of the Public 
Schoolboy. The tone of his war poems to some 
extent suggests the " old boy " on a school speech- 
day, and to one at least of his admirers it was a 
shock to see a mind which in the recent past had 
been as active, as daring, as sensitive, as fresh as 
Mr. Hueffer's, becoming a middle-aged mind. And 
yet the " old boy " attitude is of the very essence 
of middle age; it is a deliberate orgy of reaction. 
Middle age is acquiescent where youth is rebellious. 
Middle age is intent on recovering the thrill of 
a dead romance, on reviving an old glamour, while 
youth " reasons why," strives to break free from the 
bondage of the past, and peers eagerly into the 



114 REPUTATIONS 

future for a glimpse of that glamour which surrounds 
to-morrow. To middle age " to-morrow " must 
be the same as yesterday, or it will be indignantly 
disowned. Youth will have no more of yesterday. 

The Great War, which to middle age seemed 
something infinitely heroic and noble — more noble 
even than the Eton and Harrow cricket match — to 
youth more often appeared merely as a tragic 
farce, an insane contest between rival bands of 
slaves organised by rival profiteers. 

Nothing gives a more dismal indication of the 
change which has come over Mr. Hueffer's mind 
than the fact that the qualities of his war poems 
are almost exclusively those which belong to average 
descriptive reporting. The artist in him is sub- 
merged in the newspaper man, and he hits the 
bull's eye of " topicality " every time. He can 
write of wangling leaves from the adjutant, and of 
machine guns going " wukka wukka " in a way to 
cause a thrill in the bosom of Mr. Kipling's 
admirers — 

" And far away to the left 
Wuklca wukka. 
And sharply, 
WuJc . . . wuk" 

Perhaps the true hero of this war was some poor 
devil who was struck down by a a wukka- wuk ' 
while a roar of derisive laughter broke out of him. 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 115 

Could only such a great Dionysian laugh now 
re-echo through the world, the whole silly business 
might be seen, as by a lightning flash, in just 
perspective. 

The further Mr. Hueffer gets away from the War 
and popular emotionalism, the more his hand re- 
members its old cunning. In one poem he begins 
to sketch some remote and beautiful landscape — 

" The seven white peacocks against the castle wall 
In the high trees and the dusk are like tapestry, 
The sky being orange, the high wall a purple barrier 
The canal, dead silver in the dusk, 

And you are far away. 
Yet I can see infinite miles of mountains. 
Little lights shine in rows in the dark of them " 

But the second verse opens with " Around me 
are the two hundred and forty men of B Company," 
etc., and the poem relapses into the kind of slop 
which, at the moment it was written, it was almost a 
criminal offence not to admire. The poem which 
follows it, " The Silver Music," seems to suggest 
that the War had temporarily obscured Mr. Hueffer's 
usually keen faculty of self-criticism. It reads 
like a parody which he might have composed over 
the telephone for the benefit of a young friend, as 
an illustration of the kind of verse The Spectator 
would be certain to print — 

" Oh ! I'm weary for the castle, 
And I'm weary for the Wye," etc. 



116 REPUTATIONS 

the topographical note, style A. E. Houseman — 

" And another soldier fellow 
Shall come courting of my dear 
And it's I shall not be with her 
With my lips beside her ear " 

To the young friend's objection : " How could 
' I ' be with her, unless c I ' were a sort of ghostly 
gooseberry?" one can almost hear Mr. Hueffer's 
tired rejoinder : " But, my dear chap, that is just 
the sort of thing that Strachey eats ! " 

In " One Last Prayer," the musician in Mr. 
Hueffer asserts himself, and the result is a song 
which is worthy to rank with " A la Mauresque " 
in its simplicity and beauty — 

" I have only you beneath the skies 
To rest my eyes 

From the cruel green of the fields 
And the cold, white seas 
And the weary hills 
And the naked trees. 

I have known the hundred ills 

Of the hated wars. 

Do not close the bars, 

Or draw the blind. 

I have only you beneath the stars : 

Dear, be kind ! " 

But, with this exception, the only poem in the 
book which reaches the level of the author's best 
work is the one which gives it its title, and this one 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 117 

was written before the outbreak of war. " On 
Heaven " seems to have been inspired in the first 
instance by a desire to show the young American 
school of poets how very much better an old hand 
could, if he chose, do their particular " stunt." 
But once embarked on the poem, the possibilities 
of the medium seem to have enchanted him, and 
he has let himself go in an imaginative and emo- 
tional rhapsody which is perhaps one of the best 
things of its kind which has yet appeared. After 
reading it, one can only hope that Mr, Hueffer's 
natural force is only temporarily abated, and that 
his lost youth will soon be restored to him. 

Mr. Walter de la Mare's poetry — so pure, so 
remote — is like an echo from some fairy -land, mid- 
way between earth and heaven, to whose gates only 
poets and children have the key. His melodies are 
haunting and eerie in their high clarity and strange- 
ness. They are like songs heard at night-time in 
some deep wood whose paths are chequered by 
moonlight, whose shadowy thicknesses are thronged 
with ghosts. 

" Breathe not — trespass not; 
Of this green and darkling spot, 
Latticed from the moon's beams, 
Perchance a distant dreamer dreams; 
Perchance upon its darkening air, 
The unseen ghosts of children fare, 
Faintly swinging, sway and sweep, 
Like lovely sea -flowers in its deep ; 



118 REPUTATIONS 

While, unmoved, to watch and ward, 
'Mid its gloomed and daisied sward, 
Stands, with bowed and dewy head, 
That one little leaden lad." 

His feeling for Nature and his love of flowers and 
birds are not surpassed either by Mr. W. H. Davies 
or by the late Francis Ledwidge, as the little poem 
called " The Linnet " is enough to indicate — 

" Upon this leafy bush 
With thorns and roses in it, 
Flutters a thing of light, 
A twittering linnet. 
And all the throbbing world 
Of dew and sun and air 
By this small parcel of life 
Is made more fair; 
As if each bramble-spray 
And mounded, gold-wreathed furze 
Harebell and little thyme, 
Were only hers; 
As if this beauty and grace 
Did to one bird belong, 
And, at a nutter of wing, 
Might vanish in song." 

Mr. de la Mare, luckily, was not inspired to write 
war poems ; but the poet's sense of horror at the 
martyrdom of mankind finds poignant expression 
in the piece called " The Marionettes " — 

" Let the foul Scene proceed : 

There's laughter in the wings; 
Tis sawdust that they bleed, 
But a box Death brings. 

5JC 5JC «J6 Bp 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 119 

Gigantic dins uprise ! 

Even the gods must feel 
A smarting of the eyes 

As these fumes upsweal. 

Strange, such a Piece is free, 

While we Spectators sit, 
Aghast at its agony, 

Yet absorbed in it ! 

Dark is the outer air, 
Coldly the night draughts blow, 

Mutely we stare and stare 
At the frenzied Show. 

Yet heaven hath its quiet shroud 

Of deep, immutable blue — 
We cry * An end ! ' We are bowed 

By the dread, ' Tis true ! ' " 

And so we are brought back again to the 
conclusion that it is men like Walter de la Mare, 
D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon — men who have 
either shunned the War altogether in their verse or 
attacked it with an almost revolutionary fervour — 
who, since the death of Flecker and of Rupert 
Brooke, have alone kept alive the art of poetry 
in England. 

The ardours of revolutionary idealism warm 
and fire the creative impulse like the ardours 
of romantic love. Perhaps the agonies from 
which the world is so slowly emerging will 
produce in England a new Shelley, a new and 
greater Byron, whose work will enshrine, not a 
frenzy of hatred and a desire for maniacal destruc- 



120 REPUTATIONS 

tion, but a passion for a freer and nobler life in the 
new world which will be built up by the tireless hands 
of the young men of to-morrow, which will be 
cemented with the blood of the martyrs, of the 
despised and rejected pioneers of to-day. The 
ghastly absurdities of mutual murder can never — at 
this period of the world's history — be immortalised 
by the arts. Only the lyrical journalism of a corrupt 
and lying Press can properly occupy itself with the 
tinsel glories in which one of the greatest crimes 
yet committed by the Western races is sought to 
be wrapped up by those dark forces which were 
principally responsible for it. 

All great art, in every country, must spring 
ultimately from the heart of the people. In the late 
War the peoples of Europe suffered a martyrdom 
almost without parallel in the world's history. 
Surely when the masses in every country become 
articulate — through the medium of the great poets, 
painters and dramatists who must inevitably arise — 
their utterances will be neither a slavish kissing of 
the rod, nor yet a slavish adulation of the social 
system which made their suffering possible. 

And if we are to have a renaissance of poetry 
in England we must have a new criticism to meet 
it — a savage, rasping criticism, speaking with the 
bitter notes of an idealism which longs passionately 
for the best, and will no longer tolerate shams. 



THE WAR AND THE POETS 121 

Criticism must once again become the task of those 
who have an uncompromising standard of values, 
of those whose love for what is real and sincere 
will not permit them to deal gently with what is 
false, pretentious, empty and ephemeral. 

During the War we saw in England the mawkish 
theory that death on the field of battle automati- 
cally made a man a creditable poet, upheld by 
almost every critic of literature who wished to find 
a ready market for his wares. They could not, it 
seemed, do honour to the men who died without 
making themselves parties to a fraud. No doubt 
the ghoulish traffic in the verse exercises of dead 
schoolboys was an excellent business " proposition." 
No doubt some publishers — by bleeding the be- 
reaved parents to pay for the production of their 
sons' pathetic little poems, or by gulling the public, 
with the aid of the sentimental reviewers and 
critics — managed to make a great deal of money 
out of it. But it is a damaging reflection on the 
influence of the War on the British reading public 
that it should have been a " stunt " which it was 
possible to work so blatantly. 



AN OUTBURST ON GISSING 



AN OUTBURST ON GISSING 

" It is a terribly sad book, but oh, so true ! " 
said an elderly lady of my acquaintance, when she 
came to the last page of George Gissing's New 
Grub Street. After I had finished the book myself — 
she pressed it upon me and would not be denied — 
I felt inclined, with certain reservations regarding 
its truth, to make the same comment. I know that 
I fled that evening to the nearest picture palace, 
in the hope that Chaplin would dispel from my 
mind this grisly vision of Victorian London. For 
exasperating as Gissing's stories are — and to me 
New Grub Street is the most exasperating of them 
all — they do succeed in conveying an impression 
of actuality. Gissing is a faithful recorder, but he 
does not understand what he sees, and the running 
commentary which he supplies is an agonising 
revelation of a starved soul with a warped outlook 
and a false sense of values. His portrait gallery 
of worms undoubtedly must have had living proto- 
types. He could not have invented such people 
out of his inner consciousness. But surely only a 

125 



126 REPUTATIONS 

Gissing could have thought of them as " heroes," or 
invited sympathy from his readers on their behalf ! 

No doubt, in the 'eighties and 'nineties of the 
last century, London contained any number of 
hard-up literary men, of high ideals and defective 
education, who bore the motto " please kick 
me " suspended round their servile necks. And 
to such men, as to Gissing himself, normal human 
beings — individuals with blood in their veins 
instead of diluted Stephens' ink — must have 
looked like villains. I must confess that it is the 
villains who are the only characters to whom 
Gissing introduces us who seem to me at all 
tolerable. The way they spurn and ill-treat his 
heroes and heroines is intensely sympathetic. 
Anybody with a spark of intelligence would do 
the same. Any woman worth her salt would fly 
from a nincompoop like Edwin Reardon, the hero 
of New Grub Street, in six weeks, not six years. 
She would fly from him because her good sense 
would urge her instinctively to revolt against the 
diseased vanity and egomania which underlay his 
deadly virtues. 

The appeal to pity in Gissing's books is so 
repellent that the ordinary reader who comes to 
Gissing without any parti-pris can only suspect 
that self-pity — in the author — combined with a 
deficient sense of humour, are responsible for it. 



AN OUTBURST ON GISSING 127 

Again and again Gissing asks you to admire some 
seedy clerk who studies masterpieces of literature 
in his attic, carries about with him that battered 
old stage property the " much-thumbed Horace," 
and yearns disastrously for higher things. Per- 
sonally, as I read of his endeavours and ideals, his 
misfortunes, his wretched poverty and unsuccess, 
I feel growing up within me an awful desire to do 
him a mischief, and I hurry on impatiently till 
the flourishing and heartless villain does it for 
me. If I were an employer of a Gissing hero I 
should be tempted to sack him when he least 
expected it, out of sheer mechancete. I should 
listen to his tragic outburst about his invalid wife 
and his eight starving children without a grain 
of pity; and end the interview by advising him 
curtly to take his family to the workhouse and 
himself with them. 

And yet, after indulging in all these lively 
emotions, after hurling works by Gissing into the 
garden or out into the street, after stamping on 
them or using them as missiles, it is necessary 
to make acknowledgments. Characterless work 
arouses no emotions in the reader whatever. 
Perhaps it requires as much talent in a writer to 
make one really angry as to give one pleasure. 
If Gissing' s people did not live — live in all their 
native beastliness, sham humility, lack of humour 



128 REPUTATIONS 

and smarmsy fine feelings — one could not possibly 
get in such a rage either with him or them ! 

I remember on one occasion, when I was denounc- 
ing Gissing to a brother novelist, that he interrupted 
my flow of invective by reminding me of this truth. 
Gissing is not negligible : his books are social 
history, documents, detailed, relentless statements 
of lower-middle class life in what, in some respects, 
was one of the darkest ages in English social 
history. They are statements of fact drawn up by 
one who actually lived the life which he describes, 
dimly perceived its horror, but not having the 
imagination to enable him to escape from it him- 
self, painted in pathetic colours the lives of men 
who similarly failed. The chief weakness of Giss- 
ing as an artist lies perhaps in this lack of imagina- 
tive insight. He seems to have been unable to 
perceive that his pathetic literary strugglers had 
only to pull themselves together, and to get on to 
their hind legs without appealing to fate to come 
along and help them, in order to be free. If a 
man is free within himself, he can laugh at the 
superficial servitude imposed upon him by economic 
circumstances. But Gissing's people are chained 
far more by their own idiotic sense of possession 
(the " little home," the " few choice books "), and 
by their Victorian respectability, than they are 
by their poverty. This patent fact never seems 



AN OUTBURST ON GISSING 129 

to have occurred to Gissing himself, with the result 
that when he ceases merely to record, and throws 
the high lights of heroism on to his character's 
worst faults, he becomes a source of moral infec- 
tion. A cordon sanitaire should be drawn round 
the admirers of Gissing's heroes. Such people are 
a danger to the community. To be a Gissing type 
is to be a plague-carrier ; to admire one is, perhaps, 
even worse. 

From the point of view of literary style, Gissing's 
writing has always seemed to me atrocious — as 
objectionable as the people and the life which he 
describes. His style is pretentious, pompous and 
illiterate. He rejoices in circumlocution, in the 
use of big, shoddy words where simple ones are 
ready to his pen. I remember a horrible passage 
in one of his lesser novels which describes a man 
going into his bedroom to change for dinner, in 
these terms : " He withdrew into his bedchamber 
for the purpose of attiring himself in the habili- 
ments proper for the evening." When he came 
out again, one gathers that he was " attired " in 
" faultless evening dress." Perhaps the real pathos 
of Gissing's life is to be found in that word " habili- 
ments " ; but how is the precise flavour of it to 
be put into words ? To say merely that his writing 
shows an ambition to be " genteel," implies a covert 
sneer which Gissing does not deserve. Perhaps he 



130 REPUTATIONS 

was in some ways quite a simple man. But he 
over-rated certain things — " education " among 
them. No doubt in his passion for education (he 
was a precocious schoolboy) he became deeply 
learned, far more learned than many who have 
enjoyed greater advantages. (He says somewhere, 
" I had in me the making of a scholar. With leisure 
and tranquillity of mind, I should have amassed 
learning. Within the walls of a college I should 
have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my imagina- 
tion ever busv with the old world . . .") Yet he 
seems to have valued mere learning for its own 
sake in a way impossible to any truly educated 
man. Perhaps the chief thing which " education M 
can do for the individual is to give him such a 
healthy contempt for education as an end that 
he is free to use it as a means. The really educated 
man can treat learning as a servant to the under- 
standing, instead of valuing it, as Gissing did, for 
its own sake. Another thing which Gissing similarly 
over-rated is " social position." His writings reveal 
the lamentable fact that almost the only kind of 
Englishmen who can really despise class distinc- 
tions and get free from them are those whose 
social degree is marked in plain figures. Patheti- 
cally, over and over again, Gissing " loves a real 
gentleman." 

His point of view towards learning, the learning 



AN OUTBURST ON GISSING 131 

derived from books, is disclosed in his most popular 
work, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, a 
volume which, for reasons that baffle me, is still 
beloved by an enormous number of readers. Here 
we see the poor, middle-aged student, spending the 
evening of his days in retirement, poring over his 
books, working in his garden, culling beautiful 
thoughts from the classics. What a charming 
picture ! How perfectly sweet ! Could Marcus 
Stone himself improve upon it ? To me this book 
has a reek of corruption and decay; it smells 
fouler than a rotting corpse. Faugh ! Better the 
twilight of the drunkard and the debauchee than 
this sentimental death-in-life. The spectacle 
conjured up of Henry Ryecroft in his library 
makes me want to throw open every door and 
window in the house. Perhaps the reason is that 
though I love the contents of good books, I am not 
a " bibliophile," and I detest libraries. To my 
mind a book which is a real book should send the 
reader back to life refreshed and stimulated, 
instead of providing him with a dusty funk-hole 
in which he can shelter from that mental struggle 
which ought to be perpetual between the cradle 
and the grave. 

I suppose that Gissing's novels have been kept 
alive by their half-unconscious revelation of the 
world in which he lived, of the sort of influences 



132 REPUTATIONS 

which moulded his mind. He knocked the lid off 
Pandora's box, so that to-day his readers' nostrils 
are appalled by the mixed odours of Victorian 
stuffiness which assail them as they turn the pages 
of his works. But interesting as the revelation is, 
it does not make Gissing a great novelist. His 
reputation is largely a factitious reputation, a truth 
which Mr. Frank Swinnerton himself, in his admir- 
ably impartial critical study of the author, is 
forced to allow his readers to infer. 



THE AUTHOR OF 'TARR' 



THE AUTHOR OF < TARR ' 

It must, I suppose, have been towards the end 
of 1909 when Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in an artless 
Parisian disguise, penetrated into an editor's bath- 
room and read him the MS. of The Pole. The 
editor in question (Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer) 
printed The Pole with as little delay as possible, 
and very soon all the people in London who make 
it their business to talk about " a new voice," an 
" individual note," and so on, began busily to talk 
about its author. However, with a promising 
literary reputation already in the making, Mr. 
Lewis inconsiderately switched off his energies to 
his other art, and for some years his name ceased 
to appear in conjunction with his particular brand 
of ironic character study, and became linked, 
instead, with vivid decoration. Then Blast broke 
out, followed by the War — whether there was any 
connection between these two convulsions, I cannot 
attempt to say — and, to the alarm of some of his 
admirers. Mr. Lewis acquired the manifesto habit. 

We learned, how T ever, about this time, that his 

135 



136 REPUTATIONS 

long silence did not mean that he had abandoned 
literature, but that all these years a great novel 
had been in progress. Sometimes portions of the 
MS. were lent to the faithful for an hour or two, 
then hurriedly recovered by the author for revision. 
I remember on one occasion being handed so much 
as a hundred pages, which I carried away in triumph, 
and began to read on the top of an omnibus, 
not knowing how soon they would be taken from 
me. Meanwhile, his early sketches, contributed to 
various periodicals such as The English Review, 
and to my own defunct magazine, had been collected 
together into a volume which had actually been 
made the subject of a contract. Positively, the 
book was to appear. But it did not appear, for 
the War destroyed the enterprising firm which had 
secured it. 

The novel, however, was luckier. After its many 
revisions it was finally completed, and thanks to 
the courage of The Egoist, Tan has at last seen 
the light. 

To have waited for a novel for so many years, 
to have had one's interest so prodigiously aroused 
and then at long last to find the book in one's 
hand — elegantly printed on excellent paper, and 
sedately bound — was, it must be admitted, rather 
a strain on the nerves. The delays attending the 
birth of Tarr had the effect of putting an edge to 



THE AUTHOR OF ' TARR ■ 137 

one's defensive weapons of criticism, and in 1918 
it was certainly easier to examine it impartially 
than it might have been in 1914. Much water has 
run under the bridges in the past six years, and 
most of the daring innovations of pre-war days 
are already vieuxjeu. 

Mr. Lewis probably despises the novel as an 
art-form, and this may have led him to under- 
estimate its difficulties, with the inevitable result 
that, although Tarr contains many delightful pages 
and several brilliantly-handled episodes, the general 
effect (I must confess it) seems to me unsatisfactory. 
As a novel it has two faults, of which the more 
unfortunate is its lack of contrast. The book, 
from beginning to end, is on one note, and this 
makes it a little difficult to read straight through. 
Its second defect is that the subject of the story 
is unworthy of the treatment. Mr. Lewis has the 
faculty of seeing things from an individual angle. 
He can turn his peculiar private searchlight on to 
human beings with surprising and often delicious 
results : and his particular vein of ironic humour 
is, so far as I know, unique in English literature. 
When one reads him one thinks of no one else, 
except occasionally of Jules Romains, or of 
Charles Louis Philippe. It is, therefore, doubly 
unfortunate that in Tarr he should have used his 
gifts to paint for us (and with what depressing 



138 REPUTATIONS 

gusto !) only those scarcely human or completely 
sub-human waste products which before the War 
London used to segregate as far as possible in the 
Cafe Royal, and the rest of the world used to 
dump with indescribable relief in the Quartier 
Latin. The chief characteristic of the mass of 
detrimental humanity which inhabits — or used to 
inhabit — these two breeding grounds of the fumiste 
and the poseur, besides its purely animal licence, 
is its complacency and its addiction to what in 
small children is called " showing off." It is true 
that from time to time these rank swamps throw 
up to the surface a great painter or a great poet. 
But on his emergence into the world of men and 
women, with what haste he usually scrapes the 
dirt from himself ! 

The Cafe Royal (considered as an " art " centre 
merely) was first and foremost a home of sham 
originality. It was an alert cosmopolitan institu- 
tion ; it had plenty of flair for what was going to 
go, and it kept its eyes aiid ears open and scanned 
the artistic horizons of the world for " stunts " 
which it could profitably imitate. If a u new 
movement " was started on the Continent the Cafe 
Royal was always the first place to hear of it 
and to " produce " it in England. If a new genius 
appeared in Vienna or in Odessa or Seattle, the 
Cafe Royal scented him from afar, robbed him of 



THE AUTHOR OF ' TARR ' 139 

his secret, and hastily turned it into cash and 
kudos. Thus the crowd has come to believe that 
it was a spot from which new movements in art 
really sprang, whereas in point of fact it was only 
a centre from which they were exploited. For the 
truth is that revolutions in art or in anything else 
are but rarely accomplished by people who wear 
back-hair, purple shirts and passionate bow-ties — 
particularly in the present age. Nowadays genius 
no longer dresses the part, and is apt to be un- 
sociable. The true pioneer is far more likely to 
be found living alone in a back room in some 
respectable suburban villa residence, with a glass 
of hot milk by his side, than disporting himself 
in public and destroying the coats of his stomach 
with absinthe or liqueurs. That the true artist 
and the monk have much in common must be 
obvious to a man of Mr. Lewis's intelligence; 
and since he is quite capable of seeing wherein lies 
the real romance of his subject, it is depressing to 
find his pictures of squalor and idiocy illuminated 
by no imaginative contrast. 

Another reason why, in the popular mind, the 
Quartier Latin, the King's Road Chelsea, the 
Cafe Royal, and so on, are regarded as romantic 
spots, is probably because so many people have 
had an inexpensive debauch in those accommodat- 
ing localities. But it is not the strayed reveller 



140 REPUTATIONS 

or the sentimental traveller who is really char- 
acteristic of them. And it is, alas, from their 
permanent population — the essential Cafe-Royalist, 
the indigene of the Quartier — that Mr. Lewis has 
exclusively chosen his characters. One marvels 
at his interest in them; but though he has drawn 
them all for us with extraordinary skill and insight, 
it is not easy to share this interest. There are 
moments also when he seems unable to take a 
detached view of his creations, when he takes them 
seriously. About the pretentious Tarr he sometimes 
even writes pretentiously; and there are times 
when he sinks into describing his menagerie of 
vociferously clever eccentrics in a vociferously 
clever and eccentric prose. 

The story opens in Paris, in the Boulevard du 
Paradis, with a meeting between Tarr (described 
in the Prologue as " one of the showmen of the 
author ") and a walking cock-shy named Hobson. 
" This was Alan Hobson's outfit — a Cambridge 
cut disfigured his originally manly and melo- 
dramatic form. His father was a wealthy merchant 
somewhere in Egypt. He was very athletic, and 
his dark and cavernous features had been con- 
structed by nature as a lurking-place for villainies 
and passions. He was untrue to his rascally, 
sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, 
neglecting his muscles, and his dastardly face 
attempted to portray delicacies of common sense 



THE AUTHOR OF C TARR> 141 

and gossamer-like backslidings into the inane that 
would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would 
occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance 
and blacksmith muscles for a short time, however. 
And his strong, piercing laugh threw A.B.C. 
waitresses into confusion. The art- touch, the 
Bloomsbury stain, was very observable. Hobson's 
Harris tweeds were shabby. A hat suggesting 
that his ancestors had been Plainsmen, or some 
rough, sunny folk, shaded unnecessarily his coun- 
tenance, already far from open." 

Into the ears of this detested acquaintance, 
Tarr pours, capriciously, a violent manifesto on 
the subject of sex and the artist. 

" Sex is a monstrosity. It is the arch abortion 
of this filthy universe. How c old-fashioned * — 
eh, my fashionable friend? We are all optimists 
to-day, aren't we? God's in His Heaven, all's 
well with the world ! I am a pessimist, Hobson. 
But I'm a new sort of pessimist. I think I am the 
sort that will please ! I am the Panurgic-pessimist, 
drunken with the laughing gas of the abyss. I 
gaze on squalor and idiocy, and the more I see it, 
the more I like it. Flaubert built up his Bouvard 
et Picuchet with maniacal and tireless hands. It 
took him ten years. That is a long draught of 
stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the 
dung-heap ? " 

When Tarr has finished discussing his theories 



142 REPUTATIONS 

about sex with Hobson, he proceeds, during the 
remainder of the book, to put them into practice. 
The result is disappointing. In sexual matters 
Tarr is a commonplace sort of dog for all his tall 
talk. If he were really the kind of character the 
author would have us believe him to be, he could 
never have tolerated playing the lead in such a 
worthless company. This cosmopolitan art coterie 
in which Tarr (who, in spite of his protestations, 
is at heart as much a Cafe-Royalist as the cheapest 
of them) is not ashamed to move and have his 
being, consists of his German fiancee, Bertha Lun- 
ken, a comic cad named Kreisler, Anastasya Vasek, 
a Russian-American-German lady of an ample 
freedom of person and deportment, and a number 
of subsidiary rapins of both sexes. With this 
material it is only fair to say that the author does 
wonders. The story jerks itself forward in a series 
of episodes, some of which, in their particular 
vein, are beyond praise. The details, for example, 
of Tarr's typically English " furious quarrel " with 
Kreisler are described inimitably. The quarrel 
is merely an indulgence in comedy-drama on Tarr's 
part. At bottom his detachment is complete, and 
he plunges into the fight under the stimulus not of 
hatred, but of his native humour, for emotional 
diversion. The episode of Kreisler's appearance 
at the Bonnington Club, sansfrac, of the duel with 



THE AUTHOR OF c TARR ' 143 

Soltyk, and of Tarr's affaire with Anastasya Vasek, 
are all so excellently done that one wishes they 
could be detached from the book and served up 
separately. Some one ought to take Tarr and 
make an anthology of its best passages, scrapping 
the manifesto element. For it is in his manifestoes 
and pronouncements on art and life, in his sen- 
tentious " Prologue " and " Epilogue," that Mr. 
Lewis's talent is most obscured by Cafe-Royalism. 
In the domain of ideas he is not a genuine inno- 
vator or revolutionary : he has no real depth. 
Unlike Mr. Joyce and Mr. D. H. Lawrence, his 
thought seems not to be rooted in any national 
soil, nor is it inspired by any religious experience. 
His generalisations have thus at times an air of 
insincerity and clap-trap, of being addressed to 
the gallery. On the character of his degenerate 
Kreisler he bases the reflection that " Preparations 
for outbursts of potential rudeness form a part 
of the training of a German." (One can see this 
being quoted with gusto in the evening papers.) 
He even explains that Kreisler, in the book, is a 
" German, and nothing else," which is about as 
illuminating as saying that Crippen was a typical 
Englishman — " the " Englishman, in fact. And 
his comments on Nietzsche can only be based on 
the assumption that none of the readers of Tarr 
will have absorbed a line of that writer. 



144 REPUTATIONS 

However, it is perhaps not fair to dwell on the 
occasional lapses from his own standard of an 
author who, at his best — as in a number of passages 
in Tarr, and also in various sketches contributed 
in the past to The English Review, and more recently 
to The Little Review — comes so close to genius 
as Mr. Lewis. The good things in Tarr make the 
book more worth buying than ninety out of every 
hundred of the novels which have made their 
appearance in the last ten years. The qualities 
of Mr. Lewis's prose bear the impress of per- 
sonality, and are peculiar to himself. He is a 
master of irony ; and he sees with his own eyes. 



THE GORDON SELFRIDGE OF 
ENGLISH LETTERS 



THE GORDON SELFRIDGE OF ENGLISH 

LETTERS 

Although the revelation of those regular 
methods of industry by whieh Anthony Trollope 
composed his admirable works may have shocked 
some of our minor poets, his example has, never 
theless, been followed by many of our most dis 
tinguished and most highly appreciated writers 
For we live in a strenuous and methodical age 
Pelmanism has pitilessly regulated our minds 
militarism has drilled our muscles; the velvet 
jacket of a bygone Bohemianism has worn itself 
to shreds and been relegated to the dustbin. Our 
modern authors no longer patiently await their 
moments of inspiration, amid conducive surround- 
ings. The muse is forced to bestir herself through 
the energies and importunities of a generation 
of novelists who will not wait a moment. They 
cannot wait : neither their publishers nor their 
public will let them. 

To achieve success in the profession of letters, 
it is necessary to-day not only to have an enormous 

147 



148 REPUTATIONS 

output, but also to maintain a high general level. 
Thus it follows that it is only the men in the 
hardest mental condition — those who possess the 
tidiest and the best-regulated brains — who reach 
the summits of prosperity and stay there, for 
thev alone can stand the strain. 

The work produced in this competitive commer- 
cial manner, though it may lack depth and charm, 
nevertheless tends to have qualities of clearness, 
technical efficiency and force which are by no 
means to be despised. In England the foundations 
of the contemporary novel are, as a rule, more 
solidly laid than was the case with the novel of the 
Victorian era. In the best of our current fiction 
there is usually a definite architectural plan, and 
a scheme of idea-decoration carefully designed in 
accordance with the latest modes. On the other 
hand, those uncensored flights of fancy which 
posterity so often describes as genius tend to be 
eliminated from it. Imagination often deserts it — 
together with much that is strange, fantastic, 
magical and unexpected — and invention, which 
is a so much more reliable quality, is exalted in 
its place. Not even Pelmanism can guarantee 
the happy accident. In a word, the commercially 
efficient author cannot have it both ways, and the 
work of no contemporary English writer shows 
this more clearly than that of Mr. Arnold Bennett. 



SELFRIDGE OF ENGLISH LETTERS 149 

Among the many big business men which the 
profession of letters has produced in England during 
the past two decades, Mr. Bennett must in many 
ways be considered the most successful. He is 
the best all-round man we have — the Gordon 
Selfridge of the profession — a veritable universal 
provider of literary " merchandise." When we 
consider the number and the variety of the things 
which he has done, and done efficiently, it is im- 
possible to withhold from him the most ungrudg- 
ing admiration. He is a marvel, a prodigy of 
organisation, energy and driving power. His 
annual total of " words " must be prodigious. He 
pours out plays, novels, little books of homely 
advice — how to live on twenty-four hours a day, 
how to attain success in literature — comments on 
men and things, political journalism, criticism, even 
an occasional poem, with inexhaustible profusion. 

As a journalist he is always topical, always in 
touch with the latest movement but one, and 
conversant with very nearly the newest idea. 
And he has mastered words so thoroughly that he 
can make them express almost anything he pleases. 
As a rule, his pleasure consists in punching his 
readers hard, in a not too vulnerable spot ; and he 
rarely fails to achieve his end. If the notes in 
some weekly review strike you so forcibly that 
you are startled out of your post-prandial nap at 



150 REPUTATIONS 

your club, ten to one they were dashed off by Mr. 
Bennett in his bath. (Every moment in the life 
of a business author must be made productive.) 
Mr. Bennett's fountain pen is a fountain which 
never runs dry, and all his literary products are 
" good selling lines," certain to please a " high- 
class public," guaranteed to be of superior quality. 
With what emotion must the world of publishers 
regard this man, w r ho never lets them down, who 
during long years has proved himself the acme of 
reliability ! If some American Dollar Combine 
had occasion to commission, say, an epic in twelve 
cantos on " Liberty " or a concise cyclopaedia of 
literature, to be delivered in a fortnight, to whom 
could it address itself with more confidence than 
to Mr. Bennett ? If he agreed to their proposal, 
and accepted their terms, there would not be the 
smallest doubt that {force majeure excepted) the 
epic or the cyclopedia would be delivered on the 
appointed day, and would be found a sound and 
serviceable piece of work. 

An examination of Mr. Bennett's output shows 
that his literary goods fulfil all the requirements 
of a commercial age. It is only when w T e judge 
his w r ork by standards which have nothing to do 
with commerce, success, or circulation that it is 
possible to find a flaw in it or to temper our admira- 
tion with a word of criticism. And yet, when all 



SELFRIDGE OF ENGLISH LETTERS 151 

is said, it is not the function of the critic to bother 
his head about a writer's obscurity or his renown, 
or, indeed, about his personality at all, as it exists 
outside his books. His task is to apply the acid 
to the proffered metal with a pawnbroker's precision 
and a pawnbroker's absence of false sentiment. 
The fact that Mr. Bennett has a great reputation, 
that his books sell like hot cakes, that his plays 
run for months, that he is (or was) the political 
associate of Lord Beaverbrook, cannot be allowed 
in any way to influence the judgment of any one 
urged towards criticism by a disinterested love of 
letters. The only things about Mr. Bennett with 
which the critic can concern himself are the printed 
books which bear his name. 

The task of assigning to Mr. Bennett his rightful 
position in modern English creative literature has 
been to a large extent facilitated by himself. He 
has classified for us the long list of his publications 
w T hich appear on the fly-leaves of his books. The 
shockers or " fantasias " — admirable of their 
kind — form a separate group which must not be 
confounded with his more solid and serious fictions. 
Similarly, his books of essays and belles-lettres 
are in a class by themselves. If, putting on one 
side his minor literary activities, we consider only 
those novels to which Mr. Bennett himself attaches 
importance, we shall be able to trace our author's 



152 REPUTATIONS 

artistic development, and to arrive at an estimate, 
without doing him injustice. 

In Mr. Bennett's earliest novels we can discern 
the talented young provincial beginning his literary 
career, with the roots of his being deep in the soil 
of his Five Towns. In these first efforts he is 
sincere if a shade pretentious, a little crude in the 
matter of technique, but on the whole an honest 
photographer of the men and women he understands 
best in the setting most familiar to him. There 
follows, perhaps, a period of soaring personal 
ambition, of eager getting on. We guess that Mr. 
Bennett has established himself in London; and 
from London it is but a step to Paris, that paradise 
of the clever English provincial dissatisfied with 
his environment, that disastrous finishing school 
for second-rate minds. Mr. Bennett (to judge 
entirely from his books) got Paris badly; but it 
had the effect of putting an edge on his technique. 
When, in the literary sense, he returned to his 
native province, he did so with a new power of 
presentation, a new detachment, and a clearer 
sense of values. 

His conte, The Matador of the Five Towns, a 
masterpiece in its genre, and perhaps the most 
perfect piece of work its author has ever written, 
owes a great deal to French influence. And the 
same can be said of those laborious novels of 
provincial life, minutely observed and built up 



SELFRIDGE OF ENGLISH LETTERS 153 

with the tireless hands of a man of character and 
determination, on which his reputation principally 
rests. The Old Wives' Tale, the publication of 
which marks a turning-point in Mr. Bennett's 
career, could not have been w r ritten if the author 
had not been saturated in the literature of France. 
In France the lesson of Flaubert's life survives 
as a sacred tradition — the lesson of taking pains. 
But if The Old Wives' Tale established Mr. 
Bennett's position among our foremost novelists — 
established him not, perhaps, as a master, but in 
any case as one of the most brilliant second-rate 
minds which England has produced in the present 
century — it seems, by clinching his commercial 
prosperity, to have begun the insidious process of 
cutting him off from the most valuable sources of his 
inspiration. After Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways, 
the Five Tow r ns in Mr. Bennett's novels have grown 
fainter. There are signs in his books that he has 
returned from Paris to London, to receive the reward 
of his success and to consolidate his triumph. He 
now has " a public," a large, hungry, devouring 
public. And perhaps this public is growing a little 
weary of the Potteries ? The public of a popular 
novelist must never be allowed to grow weary ! For 
one reason or another, Mr. Bennett, in his latest 
novels, gives me the impression that he is concerned 
to prove, almost in a mood of irritation, that he 
is not a provincial. He insists on the point in the 



154 REPUTATIONS 

novels of his decline — The LiorCs Share, etc. — with 
the same energy that he insists on the excellence of 
his taste in literature, music, architecture, painting 
and the fine arts. His old " regionalist " literary 
accent, shared with Thomas Hardy, Eden Phill- 
potts and others, is now scarcely to be traced in 
his writings. The strong flavour has gone out of 
them. Mr. Bennett has torn himself up by the 
roots, and his later novels, instead of being 
imaginative interpretations of a kind of life of 
which he has an intimate and instinctive under- 
standing, tend to be based on the news, to be 
" topical." Evidently these new developments have 
exactly hit the public taste, as presumably they 
were intended to do; and no doubt his sales 
increase in proportion as the real value of his 
work declines. 

In none of his books is the later Arnold Bennett 
more clearly displayed than in his topical and 
immensely successful war novel, The Pretty Lady. 
With what admirable commercial astuteness have 
the ingredients of this book been mixed ! First 
of all we have the " over- age " hero. (The War 
period saw the apotheosis of the well-preserved 
man of fifty.) Then there is the inevitable Parisian 
flavouring; but in this instance Paris is brought 
to Leicester Square in the person of the smart 
cocotte who gives the book its title. (Mr. Bennett 
has coined money out of Paris for many years, 



SELFRIDGE OF ENGLISH LETTERS 155 

and presumably realises that the Paris of the 
English and American tourist will not for a long 
time lose its attractions for the average circulating 
library subscriber.) But it was not easy to get to 
Paris during the War if you were a mere civilian, 
so Mr. Bennett, for a change, obligingly brought 
Paris to London. All the other ingredients of the 
story are equally fetching. There is an air raid 
brilliantly described, a dash of war-time " other- 
worldliness," a little (not too dangerous) sarcasm 
about the running of the War, many London social 
echoes, glimpses of war charities and of the smart 
people who amused themselves by pretending to 
run them. Even the stars in their courses seemed 
to work in Mr. Bennett's favour. To crown 
everything, his publisher, when the book appeared, 
was able to advertise it in connection with that 
now forgotten scandal, the English maison tolerSe 
at Cayeux, with which, of course, it had nothing 
whatever to do. 

The Pretty Lady is from many points of view 
an extraordinarily clever novel, but its basic 
insincerities are numerous and visible. In no case 
has the thing created taken on a life of its own 
and forced the hand of its creator. Mr. Bennett, 
one suspects, nowadays never writes what his 
artistic conscience tells him is the truth, because he 
must, without regard to the susceptibilities of his 
readers and of the libraries. He has his eye on 



156 REPUTATIONS 

his public steadily the whole time ; and he has his 
conscience as a writer safely in a strait- jacket. 
He knows exactly what will " go down," and 
resolutely expunges what may not go down. In 
a word, he plays for safety. 

With The Roll Call, that dismal re-exploration 
of old emotions lightened by modern war experi- 
ences — which was duly hailed on its appearance 
as Mr. Bennett's chef d'ceuvre — his decadence in 
his character of artist may be said to have reached 
its nadir. When a writer works too energetically 
to recapture the enthusiasms of yesterday, to revive 
dead thrills, to live intellectually in his own past, 
then we begin to fear that the future holds no 
more for him. Mr. Bennett seems to have reached 
this point. One cannot imagine that he will ever 
write a worse novel than The Roll Call. After 
this book one can no longer hope that his great 
talent will ever reach a point so near genius as it 
reached in The Matador of the Five Towns and 
The Old Wives' Tale. If it were not for these two 
beautiful works of art, no one could reproach the 
author for his subsequent short comings. But of 
writers who, like Mr. Bennett, have shown them- 
selves capable of so much, more is expected than 
the mere manufacture of literary merchandise, 
designed not to satisfy the author's artistic 
conscience, but to suit his market. 



REDDING 'ON WINES 



REDDING <0N WINES 5 

It is surely a lamentable thing that the love 
of wine for its own sake which seems to have 
characterised the Victorian era should now have 
become so rare among Englishmen. No longer 
(as in the 'sixties) does the family solicitor feel it 
incumbent on him to mitigate the aridity of his 
documents by offering his client a glass of port 
wine. No longer does a sojourn at one of the 
Universities provide our young men, if not with 
an education, at all events with an educated palate. 
The old sherries have almost disappeared, the port 
which comes to us nowadays has deteriorated 
to the same extent as our discrimination; nor 
is taste in clarets and in burgundies what it was. 
Drinking, in short, is ceasing with us to be an art, 
and is becoming every day a cruder appetite. 
Perhaps it is that as a nation we are becoming 
too much imbued with ideas of getting on or get- 
ting out, of getting things done and doing them 
now. When we drink we expect something to 
happen, or else we want our money back. We 

159 



160 REPUTATIONS 

drink for results ; it is only the effect which matters. 
Our ideas seem to have reduced themselves to the 
simple formula that champagne is undoubtedly 
the best way of " getting there " if you can afford 
it, but that whisky will do well enough if you 
can't. 

The true wine drinker, the man who regards 
good wine as " poetry in solution," and feels for 
it that romantic regard which occasionally inspired 
our grandfathers, is become one of the rarest 
kinds of connoisseur that exist among us. We 
often encounter individuals who collect postage 
stamps, and, still more often, men w r ho haunt 
sale-rooms and antique shops to display their 
expertise over pictures or old china; while as for 
those to whom second-hand book catalogues are 
the favourite form of literature, they are an immense 
class. But I wonder how many people there are 
left who keep a copy of Redding On Wines in their 
dining-rooms, and w T hose favourite diversion is 
the examination of a long and complicated wine- 
list ? In the 'fifties the study of Cyrus Redding' s 
learned treatise was so much a part of a gentle- 
man's education that the volume found its way 
into Bohn's Library, and went into several editions 
in that august series. Now, alas, it is a familiar 
denizen of the sixpenny barrow. 

That there are a few left among us who preserve 



REDDING 'ON WINES 5 161 

the old tradition goes without saying, and perhaps 
they make up in enthusiasm what they lack in 
numbers. Of my personal acquaintances I can 
recall perhaps half a dozen devotees, of whom 
the most remarkable was an Oxonian poet, 
w T ho had the reputation of being the most dis- 
tinguished classical scholar of his year. He was a 
man of the most refined susceptibilities; never- 
theless, I remember that he habitually faced the 
startling decorations of the Trocadero Restaurant 
merely for the pleasure which it gave him to turn 
over the pages of its gigantic Carte des Vins. 
Another friend had an exotic Soho acquaintance 
" in the trade," from whom he procured those 
humble wines of the people which used to be 
imported to give Italians, exiled in London, the 
illusion of home. To my friend, I suppose, they 
gave the illusion of travel. 

I imagine the true wine lovers of to-day as an 
austere and temperate body of men (far more 
temperate, indeed, than most teetotallers); impe- 
cunious; lovers of the sun; addicted to foreign 
travel; yet, to a man, claiming France as their 
only real seconde patrie. 

Foreign travel being still, for the moment, made 
difficult by passport restrictions, the devotees who 
remain at home are thrown back on wine merchants' 
remnants and on chance discoveries in shops. 

M 



s 



162 REPUTATIONS 

With them hunting for cheap yet drinkable wine 
is become a pastime, like hunting for Longton Hall 
figures or for first editions; and the difficulties 
of the search are increasing daily. Nevertheless, 
discoveries — since our cellars even now must 
contain some millions of uncorked bottles, and 
every unopened wine bottle is an adventure— are 
still to be made by those who persevere. 

The unearthing, in a sleepy provincial town, of a 
bottle of Liebfraumilch for the sum of three-and- 
sixpence, recently filled a friend of mine with 
elation for an entire week. He carried his bottle 
home as tenderly and reverently as if it were a 
Waterford decanter. Another acquaintance, visit- 
ing a still sleepier town, came on a whole cache 
of golden Montrachet at its original price. 

No such good fortune has, alas ! come my own 
way ; but among the minor consolations of collect- 
ing I reckon the discovery of a " Touraine Superi- 
eure," in a hock-shaped bottle, for the modest sum 
of half-a-crown. It was not a " selling line,' 5 and 
its original roughness had accordingly been toned 
down by some years of repose in the wine merchant's 
vaults. I suppose its name did not convey very 
much to the ordinary purchaser of Beaunes and 
St. Juliens ; but to me it brought delicious memories 
of white wines drunk on the banks of the Loire 
in the golden evenings of a far distant June — 



REDDING 'ON WINES' 163 

memories of Pouilly and of Vouvray, where the 
wines are so different from the acrid filth which 
is all that seems to be left over for the inhabitants 
of Saumur. When I got my bottle home and 
sipped it at dinner, the flavour of the wine reminded 
me of Vouvray. And who would not like to be 
reminded of Vouvray, gentlest and most tranquil 
of the little towns of France ? 

I feel sure there must be many people who 
share my perhaps childish pleasure in reading the 
names on wine bottles. There must be others to 
whom, for example, the word Nuits suggests at 
once that little wayside station which the Marseilles 
rapide passes on its upward climb into the moun- 
tains of the Cote d'Or; whom the word Macon 
afflicts with a certain reminiscent dreariness; to 
whom Barsac has an intimate and sunny connota- 
tion, recalling memories of a cheerful little town 
on the banks of the Garonne, where life was once 
so easy and the sky so blue. 

The average French taste in wines, as I recall 
it, differs considerably from the taste of the average 
Englishman. I remember in a score of small inns 
up and down France finding in each, as the piece 
de resistance on the wine-list, a sweet (and to me) 
indigestible Sauterne. I am no lover of Sauternes. 
Of the bottles of this wine which I have helped to 
empty I recall none with enthusiasm. Not so 



164 REPUTATIONS 

Chablis-Moutonne, Graves, Meursault, Pouilly. At 
Gien, on the Loire, I once drank a bottle of old 
Pouilly with a friendly innkeeper, the smoothness 
and fragrance of which still linger in my memory. 
We sat at a round iron table outside the hotel. 
Beyond the double row of trees was the stone 
parapet which enclosed the treacherous, swift- 
flowing river ; and in the distance, on the opposite 
bank, a white house gleamed ghostly in the moon- 
light. When my innkeeper was a boy he had 
fired from the window of that house against the 
Prussians. " They are afraid of us now," he 
remarked truculently. u The next time we shall 
beat them, sure enough ! " How peaceful it seemed 
to be sitting like that in the still night, the sky 
above us deepest blue and powdered with stars 
like diamond sparks, the huge river swirling down 
towards the sea, a yard or two from the table on 
which reposed the bottle and our glasses ! 

Another French wine for which I have always 
had an affection is Chablis-Moutonne. I recall a 
bottle drunk at dejeuner at the Cafe de l'Embar- 
cad&re at St. Germain, on a hot summer morning, 
whose golden smoothness must have made even 
the gods envious. In the sunshine afterwards, 
walking along that terrace which overlooks the 
Seine, one felt (I remember) not unlike a rather 
dissipated god, and at four in the afternoon the 



REDDING C 0N WINES' 165 

idea of a good strong English cup of tea was far 
from displeasing. 

But of all the wines which I ever tasted in 
France, the most unique, the most unforgettable, 
was a bottle of ancient Graves unearthed for me 
from the cellars of the Hotel des Ruines at Coucy 
le Chateau. It was on Easter Eve in 1914. 
Throughout Holy Week that year the weather was 
damp and cold, and I remember distinctly feeling 
the presage of coming calamity as I travelled by 
gradual stages from Calais to Lille, and from 
Lille — passing through Arras and St. Quentin — 
to Laon and Coucy. It was late on a frosty even- 
ing when I reached Laon — that treasure of a town, 
perched on its abrupt hill. The picture which it 
presented, with its streets of old houses with 
pointed roofs, its frowsy inimitable inns, and its 
two glorious churches— the whole place surrounded 
by moss-grown ramparts and illuminated by a cold 
and impassive moon — remains engraved on my 
memory. But I drank no wine at Laon that was 
worth recalling. The supreme adventure of that 
journey awaited me at Coucy. 

I think it must have been the peculiar melan- 
choly of Coucy, under a grey sky, which made me 
so reckless. The treasure stood at the end of the 
wine-list, the dearest wine in the house with the 
exception of the Champagnes. It called itself 



166 REPUTATIONS 

modestly " Graves " — name usually associated in 
English minds with the eighteenpenny poison sold 
in pre-war days by the nearest grocer. I asked 
the patron about it, but he seemed annoyed. He 
suggested the inevitable Sauterne. I asked him 
if the Graves was not a good wine ? This was too 
much for his honesty. He confessed, with ill- 
humour, that it was magnificent; then with a 
sigh went off to the cellar in person to procure it. 
It was in an ancient dark red bottle, covered with 
cobwebs, and embossed with an heraldic seal. The 
patron handled it in the peculiar way which the 
wine drinker immediately recognises. The uncork- 
ing became an event of ceremony. The patronne 
emerged from her retreat and hovered. The two 
waiters turned away from duller occupations and 
stood like elderly acolytes while the patron himself 
seized the corkscrew, wiped the neck of the bottle 
and laid it in its little basket with the tenderness of a 
mother laying her child in its cot. When the first 
drop from the glass was caressing my palate all 
was understood, all forgiven. The yielding of the 
bottle appeared as an act of personal kindness, 
which it was presumptuous to have asked of mine 
host on the strength of so short an acquaintance. 
I wondered how he could possibly have held my 
paltry seven francs one-half so precious as the thing 
he sold. On the following evening it did not seem 



REDDING 'ON WINES' 167 

fair to demand another bottle, but I was constrained 
to ask how many more bottles of this wine of wines 
remained in the cellar. There were six more ; and 
I promised myself that I would come back again 
to Coucy and drink them up. Among the many 
minor exasperations of the War, the thought of 
German officers swilling all that liquid poetry, in 
one orgiastic night, was to me not the least. 

So much more pleasure is (to my mind) to be 
got from drinking wine than from absorbing Peace 
beer, or, what is still worse, Peace whisky, that 
I cannot help wondering why it is that wine-drink- 
ing has not come back more definitely into favour 
with the English public. 

There are still, in the wine merchants' cellars, 
quite a number of little known wines waiting to 
be rediscovered. The once rejected Madeiras and 
Marsalas and Riojas will be found by the 
explorer to be not without merit; and some of 
the wines of Austria and Hungary may safely be 
ventured on. (If popular feeling runs high it is 
always possible to wash off the label.) Not all 
experiments, naturally, will end in success. Dismal 
disappointments will be encountered frequently 
enough, even by the enthusiast with experience. 
But no man of taste should be deterred from 
adventure — no, not even by the corrosive horrors 
of cheap Carlowitz. 



168 REPUTATIONS 

The charm of wine is something quite distinct 
from alcoholic stimulation, which can be obtained 
more easily by other means. Something of the 
genius of the place it comes from manages to get 
into it. (Perhaps it is for this reason, because 
Australia has no attractions for me, that I per- 
sonally would prefer to drink almost any European 
vin ordinaire than the best Australian burgundy.) 
Wine, to-day more than ever, helps to bring a 
little warmth and gaiety and friendliness to our 
social occasions. Its use in moderation (and the 
real wine-lover is incapable of drinking to excess) 
seems to me to form a part of that art of living 
which our French neighbours understand so much 
better than we do. At the risk of being sand- 
bagged by some indignant Pussyfoot I must confess 
my sympathy with the ancient tag — Boileau is it, 
or Boufflers? — 

" Allez vieux fous, allez apprendre a boire. 
On est savant quand on boit bien ; 
Qui ne sait boire, ne sait rien." 



CLEVER NOVELS 



CLEVER NOVELS 

During the period when our intellectuals were 
suffering from their first attack of Freud-fever, I 
remember attending a lion party which had been 
convoked by a lady from Girton. Several school- 
marms of the most advanced type formed the audi- 
ence, and the principal lion was an Irish novelist 
and poet — one of the wittiest and most fluent 
talkers I have ever met. The conversation was 
directed ruthlessly towards psycho-analysis by one 
of the school-marms who, dressed in beads and 
Djibbah, sat on a cushion on the floor and gazed 
at the poet with eyes full of yearning. The Irish- 
man was fully equal to the occasion. He seized the 
ball of conversation, threw it into the air, caught it, 
played with it. He held every one's attention, and 
negotiated every awkward corner with an ease which 
simply took one's breath away. The y earner, I 
could see, was struggling to memorise each word. 
. . . After a while, giving the audience a chance to 
prattle and himself to get his breath, he turned to 
me with a broad grin and whispered, " My God, 

171 



172 REPUTATIONS 

what in Hell's name is psycho-analysis ! " Another 
instant and he was back again, and roared steadily 
for the rest of the evening. The school-marms were 
enchanted ! 

I was reminded of that intense lady dressed in 
her Djibbah and adorned by " peasant art " when 
I read Miss Clemence Dane's Legend. The group 
of female writers to whom (with admirable skill) Miss 
Dane introduces us all exhale a curious aroma of the 
girl's high school. They yearn; they take " their 
art " with extreme seriousness; they talk about it 
and about one another with a breathless sense of 
their importance. But for the lady in the Djibbah 
I should have considered them as hopelessly 
incredible; now I am impelled to believe that 
Miss Dane is writing from a wealth of experience 
which I do not envy her. 

During the past twelve years, in one way or 
another, I suppose I have seen something of as 
many different sets and circles in literary London 
as most writers. I have been to innumerable 
Evenings, even to some given by distinguished 
lady novelists. But, dull as they were, none of 
them, thank Heaven ! remotely resembled the 
Evening described by Miss Dane. The parties 
given by the most distinguished woman writer of 
my acquaintance were quite aggressively unliterary. 
Butterflies from Mayfair (or perhaps from Bays- 



CLEVER NOVELS 173 

water) made up the bulk of the guests, though there 
was, of course, a fringe of distinguished dull dogs 
who wrote books. Mr. H. G. Wells was always 
1 coming on later " ; and, rather sympathetically, 
never came. We ate at the appointed time, drank, 
smoked and gossiped; and it wasn't, as far as I 
can recall, " literary " gossip either. If we indulged 
in any mutual admiration, we certainly didn't 
display it : and even if Mr. H. G. Wells had arrived 
I don't suppose any writer in the room would 
have moved an eyelid. (The party I am thinking 
of glittered as regards " names " : apart from the 
butterflies, I think I was the most unknown person 
present.) In the lower literary altitudes, particu- 
larly those frequented by the kind of person whom 
Miss Dane has thus deliriously described — " He 
sat on the floor, and he called you c dear lady,' 
and sometimes he would take hold of your watch- 
chain and finger it as he talked to you. But he was 
awfully clever, I believe. He wrote reviews and 
very difficult poetry that didn't rhyme " — I have 
always found the conversation much more profes- 
sional. People who " write reviews," in particular, 
often put on conversational airs impossible to a 
Thomas Hardy, a Conrad or a D. H. Lawrence. 
Often they simply pulverise the poor devils who 
drain their heart's blood to provide them with 
their raw material. And they use incredibly long 



174 REPUTATIONS 

words ! But even in these circles I have never met 
with anything approaching the curious group- 
feeling which Miss Dane describes, with anything 
like the rapturous self-absorption of her characters. 
I never found a party of men and women who 
"talked until dawn"; I never knew an author 
who " wrote all night," though I have known many 
who (with more sense) danced all night whenever 
the opportunity presented itself. And I never 
heard of any woman writer who, dying at twenty- 
six, was considered worthy— by a publisher — of a 
long and detailed biography, however ably done. 
In this part of Miss Dane's story, and it is one of the 
principal points in her plot, I decline absolutely 
to believe. Her people, however, I take on trust. 
The sexual inhibitions common to over-educated 
Englishwomen lead to the queerest results, to the 
strangest warping of character and mind. Miss 
Dane has studied the outer manifestations of this 
branch of feminine psychology so carefully that 
she makes her characters live, and even succeeds in 
making them interesting, though the interest is to 
a large extent pathological. But to have made a 
book about "literary people" interesting at all, 
is in itself a remarkable achievement. She has 
done it by analysing the spites, the secret vanities 
and hungers in warped female hearts, and her 
method is perhaps the best there is for portraying 



CLEVER NOVELS 175 

an author as a human being. A writer is never 
so much a man and a brother (or a woman and a 
sister) as when he (or she) is behaving like a toad. 
His spites are usually concealed ; his other emotions 
displayed and exploited. The inexorable impulse of 
production forces him to turn them into " copy," 
and thus, in a sense, to deflower his own personality. 
It is this fact which renders all the more deplorable 
the rage now prevailing among writers of clever 
novels for filling their canvases with life-size 
portraits of clever novelists. For clever novelists, 
in the flesh, are as a rule more depressing even than 
their works. These unfortunates, when seen herded 
together in a London club, or collected in a London 
drawing-room, always remind me of sufferers from 
some incurable malady. Something — their load 
of culture, perhaps — seems to oppress them and 
imprison them; they resemble fish struggling 
helplessly in a net from which there is no hope of 
their ever being able to extricate themselves. They 
cannot — or so it appears — escape from the society 
of their own kind. They are imprisoned in their 
particular literary clique, and the result of this 
imprisonment is disastrous. In a really smart 
highbrow novel, for example in the later books of 
Gilbert Cannan, Mr. J. Middleton Murry's Still Life 
and Miss Romer Wilson's // All These Young Men, 
we meet over and over again members of the same 



176 REPUTATIONS 

dreary set viewed from different standpoints and 
described by talents of varying efficiency. The 
bloom, alas, has been rubbed off these characters, 
in the same way that it has been rubbed off the 
picture -postcard belle, after her thousandth appear- 
ance in The Taller ; and one realises that the u art " 
person can be very nearly as tiresome as " art " 
furniture or an " art " cottage. When I try to 
read novels like Mr. Murry' s Still Life, I like to 
remember King George II, that lovable character 
who didn't like " boetry " and didn't like " baint- 
ing " ; and had no hesitation in saying so. Mr. 
Murry deploys his culture rather aggressively. 
You guess he has " swotted up literature " ; and 
even on page one you divine that laboured last word 
on Dostoieffsky. His heavy load of reading 
gives his work a portentousness which (for me, at 
any rate) renders it almost unreadable; so that 
I never persevered to the end with Still Life or 
discovered what eventually happened to his 
familiar characters — characters who, in one disguise 
or another, make up the middle-class literary world 
as we all, alas, know it. 

Miss Romer Wilson has more imagination than 
Mr. Murry and a more vigorous talent. She started 
admirably with her Martin Schiller, poked her 
head for a moment out of the soup tureen, saw a 
live human being and described him. But having 



CLEVER NOVELS 177 

thus written one brilliant book, the admiration of 
her fellow intellectuals appears to have been too 
much for her. They seem to have dragged her 
down from her point of vantage, with the result 
that in her second novel she has done little but 
report their conversations. She has done it with 
a certain acidity, a sympathetic dreariness. The 
conversations are perhaps new to her; but at least 
she is quick enough to divine that to some of her 
readers they may be as stale as last month's news- 
papers. So she has tried to give them a new turn, 
to dish them up in a new way. But it is no use : it 
is the same cold mutton. Every nook and corner of 
the minds of her clever friends has long ago been 
explored and their contents exploited by their clever 
enemies. But there is hope for Miss Wilson; for 
traces of her disgust are noticeable on every page of 
If All These Young Men. She will escape yet into 
the open, and find queer people who (though, 
perhaps, they drop their aitches) are too big for 
patronage and too acrid to serve up as " perfect 
dears." 

Mr. Caiman, alas, seems now permanently to have 
ensconced himself in the deepest armchair in that 
curious cock-and-hen club which to-day takes the 
place of " Bohemia." Nowadays when he publishes 
a new novel one knows in advance that " every one " 
will be in it : and every one always is. The few 

N 



178 REPUTATIONS 

additions from the outer world in his recent photo- 
graph albums have been some comic Jews and an 
utterly unconvincing prostitute. Clever as he is, 
he does not seem to realise that for people of normal 
intelligence the prostitute is absolutely the dullest 
type of human being on which a novelist can use 
his talent. From the romantic standpoint, the 
prostitute has been found out. She is utterly 
passee de mode. The details of her career should 
be set out in Blue Books for the edification of 
sociologists. Even the realist has no excuse for 
not avoiding her : she is not real. The same objec- 
tion — that they are not real people — applies to what 
used to be known, in far-off days, as the " smart 
set." These sub-human types come in still for 
an enormous amount of attention from clever 
novelists with anaemic imaginations. A recent 
example is to be found in a novel called Richard 
Kurt, by Stephen Hudson, which describes in 
agonising detail the lecheries of a set of futile cads 
of both sexes, in whose doings no sane person could 
be interested. 

Perhaps it is the chief defect of the clever novelists 
that they cannot appreciate personality, will not 
look for it under the masks which nowadays are 
worn in the same way that the animals put on 
protective colouring. Up till the middle of the last 
century personality was marked in plain enough 



CLEVER NOVELS 179 

figures. Idiosyncracy was carried to extreme, 
human beings blossomed as extravagantly as flowers 
in a favourable soil, and the flavour of these rich 
personalities could be conveyed to paper by writers 
who were not necessarily men of genius. How 
much more vivid, and, from the point of view of 
psychology, how much more enthralling is many a 
volume of eighteenth-century memoirs than the 
average clever novel of to-day ! In an age when 
nearly everybody wears the same kind of hat, and 
lives in fear of his neighbours, exceptional human 
beings require discovery. They must be sought 
for; the masks must be torn from their faces ; the 
varnish must be scratched away. But if we dig 
down deep enough we can find the same degree of 
human interest in our contemporaries as in their 
predecessors. Marat, Gilles de Retz, Casanova, 
Benvenuto, Jeanne d'Arc, Robespierre, Elizabeth 
Chudleigh are all present with us could we but recog- 
nise them when we meet them in the Tube. The 
romantic creations of a Gautier or a Merimee are 
far truer to life— to life that is life— than all the 
clever little people in the clever little books of Mr. 
Murry, Miss Wilson and their myriad competitors. 
The most fantastic conceptions of the romantics 
come closer to essential truth than do the photo- 
graphs taken by so many of our modern novelists 
of persons who, though possessed of speech, and 



180 REPUTATIONS 

dressed like men and women, are nothing but 
human automata. Things have come to such a 
pass that if any of the characters who have left their 
mark on the history of the world were to be accur- 
ately portrayed in a novel, the book would be 
damned by the critics on the score of its grotesque 
improbability. And if any of the figures who are 
leaving their mark on the world in the present 
year of grace were to be described in their habits as 
they live, with the thoughts they actually think 
attributed to them, the author would almost 
certainly be put in gaol. 

It is precisely in their courage and originality in 
the choice of material for their stories, and in the 
wide range of their imagination, that genius and 
commercial success meet on common ground. The 
cc clever novel " gets the long notices in the weekly 
reviews ; but Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Robert Hichens, 
and Miss Edith M. Dell rake in the shekels. 
It is only when a clever novelist escapes 
from the influence of whatever coterie he graces, 
that he begins to make money. Mr. Alec Waugh's 
schoolboys are fresh ground, and so also are Mr. 
Evans 5 Welsh peasants and Mr. Thomas Burke's 
denizens of China Town — hence their popularity. 
Mr. W. L. George is another successsful writer 
who has kept free from the coteries. By his 
passionate interest in the political and social 



CLEVER NOVELS 181 

ideas which are absorbing the attention of his 
fellow-men, he has shown that a novelist may 
also be a good citizen and play a valuable part 
in the life of the community. Miss Rebecca 
West has most of the clever novelist's defects; 
but she, too, has looked out of the club 
windows. In The Return of the Soldier, despite 
the inherent vulgarity of her style, and of her point 
of view towards " the servants," she has written a 
readable story, because she has managed to escape 
the snare of writing about writers and the people 
whom writers know. She got away from the " set 
and clique " atmosphere and gave her imagination 
its chance. The plot of her novel was cheap 
enough ; but her talent embroidered its cinema-film 
outlines and turned it, with all its defects, into a 
work of art which found readers. 

Perhaps the secret of the whole business is 
colour. The " clever " writers are afraid of colour. 
Genius is never afraid of it. And the people whose 
business it is to cater for the crowd have at all 
events the horse sense to pile it on for all they are 
worth. 



1855 



1855 



Much of my spare time during my ninth and 
tenth years was spent in a dark, rather cheerless 
apartment, whose windows were obscured by various 
sorts of garden bushes and creepers. Its official 
title was the " morning-room," but with the inconse- 
quence of children, we knew it as the " tank." 
Down to the " tank " flowed the treasures rejected 
by our parents : the songs of Samuel Lover (with 
steel engravings), a large leather- bound edition of 
Byron similarly illustrated, Dr. Mark Akenside's 
Pleasures of Imagination, elaborate editions of the 
works of Rogers and Campbell, and any number 
of other outmoded books, which had had to make 
way for Ruskin and Carlyle, and Tennyson and 
Browning, and their like. They were stuck anyhow 
— the rejected ones — on the shelves of two tall, 
untidy pine bookcases, and nobody cherished them 
except me. My particular joy, however, was a 
battered casket of the brightest green enamel, 
adorned with brass fittings and an elaborate plaque 
representing an Oriental building, with a number 

185 



186 REPUTATIONS 

of gentlemen in the foreground with turbans on their 
heads, wearing red baggy trousers. This picture 
was called " Le Palais du Bey de Tunis." When 
you opened the casket an odour of fragrant anti- 
quity assailed you, coming not from the casket 
itself — which came, I fancy, from no more romantic 
source than a legal banquet attended by my grand- 
father about the year 1855 — but from its contents. 
It was filled to the top with oblong cards of thick 
parchment, dating from the first years of the nine- 
teenth century, on which had been painted the 
various symbolic figures represented by the different 
groups of stars. Each star was indicated, and the 
card pierced accordingly, so that by holding up the 
one with, say, Ursa major and Ursa minor on it, to 
the light, you could learn to discover those groups 
in the heavens for yourself. I well remember 
Cassiopeia, a lady in sandals, seated on an Empire 
chair with a red plush seat, holding up with one 
hand the insufficient drapery which concealed her 
lower limbs. Then there was Auriga, in a beaver 
hat and scarlet socks, nursing a goat and two rabbits, 
and Virgo, with angel's wings, a lily in one hand, 
sandals and a plentiful supply of garments. Among 
the curious beasts, Monoceros, with Canis minor (a 
very modern-looking black and tan) on his back, 
and Draco, a creature like the sea-serpent, stick 
in my memory. Underneath the green casket 



1855 187 

rested always a pile of four books : two volumes of 
the Drawing-room Scrap-book, British Painters of 
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century and a volume 
of Illustrations to Childe Harold, issued in the blessed 
year 1855, by the Art Union of London. These 
volumes and I became the greatest friends; on 
Sunday afternoons we were inseparable; and I 
cannot now smell the odour of old parchment 
without letting my thoughts travel back to them, 
and to the green casket in the " tank," under 
which they stood. The green casket has thus come 
to symbolise for me all that is meant by " Victorian " 
when applied to literature and art. 

Youth proverbially colours the things it sees 
with its own vividness, with all the glory that 
remains to it from the " trailing clouds." No 
doubt the Drawing-room Scrap-book is poor stuff, 
also the efforts of the gentlemen of the Art Union ; 
yet, coming across the four books the other day, 
dust-laden in an upper room in the new house to 
which their owner's vagrant habits had carted them, 
I seemed to feel nearly all the remembered delight 
as freshly as if I were once more a child. Looking 
at them with eyes that find in art their greatest 
satisfaction (among the moderns) in the work of 
such painters as Van Gogh, C6zanne, Gauguin, 
Wyndham Lewis, and Augustus John, I had no sort 
of friendly disposition towards 1850. Indeed, of all 



188 REPUTATIONS 

epochs I regarded it with the greatest horror, (Yet, 
can it be that my youngest son will find it as de- 
lightful as I find the generation that preceded it?) 
There is much to make one laugh in these old picture- 
books, but the essential charm of them — when they 
are charming — has more points in common with the 
charm of, say, the Russian Ballet, than one might 
at first sight suppose. Both rely to a large extent 
on glamour, on all the things which are opposed 
to realism. Both, in effect, are romantic. 

II 

The Drawing-room Scrap-book for the year 1840 
is adorned for the last time by the poetic efforts 
of L. E. L., a young lady as beautiful as she was 
unfortunate, and " as accomplished as she was 
beautiful," who perished at Cape Coast Castle in 
1839, and whose early death, according to her 
biographer, caused a " shock " as violent as that 
which attended the demise of Byron and of Sir 
Walter Scott. A good deal of water, you will 
notice, had already flowed under the bridges since 
the great days. No apologist, and certainly not 
myself, will, I fancy, rise at this date and call Miss 
Landon blessed. She was a quite wonderfully 
bad writer. The Arrival, however, a rhymed 
dialogue, illustrated by E. T. Parris, with a picture 
of two girls whose two heads seem to grow out of one 



1855 



189 



neck — for twenty years I imagined they were 
joined together, like the Siamese twins — has distinct 
if unconscious humour. Louisa and Cecilia one 
afternoon lament the fact that their papa has taken 
a castle in the Scottish Highlands, where their 
jewels are wasted, and there is " not a decent 
neighbour near." 

" Cecilia, I'm sure our English country seat 
Was quite enough of a retreat; 
A solitary grand old hall, 
Shut up within its high park wall ! 
And there, at least, was no despair 
O'er robes of price too good to wear. 

Louisa. No, what with Henry's friend Sir John, 
And the young Lord of Erlington, 
And Lady Peter's guests, and all 
The people from Combe-Merival, 
And Captain Mathews and his bride, 
And all our London friends beside, 
One ne'er pined for a human face 
Nor mourned o'er unsunned pearls and lace ! 
But I protest it was unkind 
To bring Court Aspley back to mind. . . ." 



If any one asked me w r hy I find this delicious, I 
should not know what to say. I can only confess 
that I can still spend a Sunday afternoon over this 
kind of thing, though I know it to be fatuous. But 
the pictures are different. There are qualities 
possessed by these engravings — especially those of 
Oriental subjects — which are lacking in much 



190 REPUTATIONS 

modern work, above all, an extraordinary glamour. 
The gorgeousness of the East must have affected 
these old T. Alloms and J. Jenkinses profoundly, 
and in their way of giving expression to their emo- 
tion — their minute, painstaking, mid- Victorian way, 
that knew so well how to give the exact values of 
satin and cloth and lace, the exact velvety sheen of a 
dark eye, and from whose ladies not an eyelash 
could fall without its being observed by their 
creators — they succeeded, sometimes enormously, 
where their successors have failed. " The Rajah's 
Daughter," for instance, by one F. P. Stephanoff, 
engraved by J. Knight, is altogether delightful. A 
young girl with almond-shaped dark eyes, pencilled 
eyebrows and dark hair mostly concealed by a 
jewelled head-dress in the nature of a turban, is 
kneeling in the foreground, in a bodice of pearls 
and an ample dress of transparent flowered gauze 
over silk, with a long musical instrument like a 
guitar in her hand. By her side is the lotus, and 
at the back romantic minarets. In spite of the 
fact that the values of the different stuffs have been 
rendered with a meticulous elaboration, and that 
each minute detail has been put in with care, the 
picture, nevertheless, remains full of " atmosphere." 
These details, for any knowing observer who has a 
strict regard for truth — or rather for " actuality," a 
totally different thing — may be, and doubtless are, 



1855 191 

quite wrong. Yet so strongly Eastern has been 
the artist's idea that this idea he communicates. 
And what is art if not "communication"? If 
there were nothing really Eastern about this picture, 
it would yet be the quintessence of the East. 

Not all the plates are as happy as this, though 
' The Gipsy Mother," by Robertson, engraved by 
Greatbatch, is admirably composed, and, but for a 
touch of forced sentiment in the mother's expression, 
would be really fine. As it is, the encampment 
underneath the tree in the distance, on the left 
of the picture, makes one greatly want to see the 
original painting. " The Andalusian Lover," by 
Edward Corbould, is mid-Victorian Romanticism 
pur et simple, reminiscent of Thomas Haynes Baily 
— the sort of thing from which, had one been a 
young man in those days, one would most violently 
have revolted. But turning on to the pictures of 
places, such as the " New Palace of Sultan Mahmoud 
II. on the Bosphorus," by T. Allom ; " The Tomb of 
St. George, Bay of Kesrouan," by William Bartlett ; 
' The Great Mosque and the Alcazar, or Dungeon 
of the Inquisition, Cordova," by D. Roberts; and 
particularly to the pictures of stormy seas, one finds 
a spaciousness, an infinite, romantic wonder that 
seem now to have left us for ever. 



192 REPUTATIONS 

III 

The magnificence of those black storms, of those 
dazzling " white horses " which dashed themselves 
against the frigates' wooden walls, the splendour and 
romance of them ! The coming of the steamer 
seems to have driven all this from art. True, the 
commercial painters produce large canvases show- 
ing lifeboats rescuing passengers from stranded 
liners, but they are nearly always mere deserts of 
inanimate paint. There is no wonder in them. 
Steam and engineering have practically conquered 
the elements, and So-and-so's preparations have 
rendered even the minute discomfort of sea-sickness 
avoidable. The thought of a storm at sea does 
not carry the imagination to its loftiest heights now, 
as it did ; the sea, from the standpoint of art, has 
become domesticated. To be drowned in it is a 
catastrophe on the same plane as being run over 
by a motor omnibus, or blown to pieces by a shell. 
I have met people but little younger than myself 
who can read such lines as these — 

" O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, 
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free," 

without turning a hair. They find nothing in it. 
" There's nothing much, anyway, in calling the 
sea ; dark blue,' " they say : " any fool could have 



1855 193 



•>-> 



called the sea c dark blue. 5 " Or again, " waft, 
they sneer, " what a stucco word ! " 

" The sails were filPd, and fair the light winds blew, 
As glad to waft him from his native home; 
And fast the white rocks faded from his view, 
And soon were lost in circumambient foam." 



It is only by inhaling the perfumes that arise 
from the green casket that used to keep watch over 
the Drawing-room Scrap-book and Childe Harold's 
Pilgrimage that I get the full flavour out of these 
lines. But what a flavour it is ! The palaces, 
cities and countries, sung by Byron and depicted by 
those old draughtsmen and engravers, seem to 
belong to some superb but vanished world, of 
which Albion and proud Lisboa formed a natural 
part — 

" What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold ! 
Her image floating on that noble tide, 
Which poets vainly pave with sands of gold, 
But now whereon a thousand keels did ride 
Of mighty strength, since Albion was allied, 
And to the Lusians did her aid afford : 
A nation swoln with ignorance and pride, 
Who lick, yet loathe the hand that waves the sword 

To save them from the wrath of Gaul's unsparing Lord." 

Gaul and Albion and the Lusians and proud 
Lisboa — especially proud Lisboa — were places and 
peoples that Turner certainly knew all about, his 



194 REPUTATIONS 

followers at least something. Proud Lisboa appears 
to me radiant, in my dreams, whenever I have had 
too much supper. I see its great harbour shut in 
by a line of hills surmounted by gleaming palaces, 
see the rolling white clouds, the " dark blue " 
waves all tipped with white foam, the skimming 
feluccas and majestic frigates — all the pomps and 
glories of old-time shipping. There, when I go 
ashore (in my dreams), I find maidens with dark eyes 
fringed with languorous lashes. They lean down 
to me, " skilled in the ogle of a roguish eye," from 
balconies set just within hand-reach, on the sides 
of palaces of pink stucco ; and sometimes they drop 
red and sometimes white roses into my bosom. 
There is always the gentle tinkle of a mandoline in 
attendance, and the murmur of a love-song steals 
through the window in the evening silence, so that 
I stop with one hand on the sword-hilt and the other 
on my heart, prepared for the adventures and 
abductions and hairbreadth escapes that inevitably 
follow. 

They were drunk, those romantics— Byron, 
Turner, Hugo, and their hosts of imitators, even 
down to the compilers of the Drawing-room Scrap- 
book — drunk in the Baudelairean sense, drunk in 
the way that no " realists " will ever at all be able 
to understand. 

They have, of course, been exploded. Abler 



1855 195 

critics than the young friends I have quoted have 
been at pains to show, in admirably turned sentences 
of annihilation, that there is " nothing in " " dark 
blue "—that it is finer art to talk about " ' Omer 
smiting 'is blooming lyre," than about— 

" Sky, mountains, rivers, winds, lakes, lightnings ! ye, 
With night, and clouds, and thunder " 

and so on. To " ye " (even when used by Mr. 
Kipling) they particularly object. The poetry of 
a tramp steamer rolling down the Channel with 
a cargo of tin cans, old iron, etc., etc.— type Mase- 
field— may be new and sweet. Personally I think 
it is. The professional critic of literature, however, 
is rarely content to add permanently to the existing 
list of things that are good. Only a limited number 
of such, in his view, are permissible. If he add 
he must simultaneously subtract. To admire the 
tin cans, you must jibe at this sort of thing, find it 
false, and strike it from its place— 

" Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll ! 
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; 
Man marks the earth with ruin— his control' 
Stops with the shore;— upon the watery plain 
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain 
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, 
When for a moment, like a drop of rain, 
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan- 
Without a grave— unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown." 



196 REPUTATIONS 

With professional art criticism I am less 
familiar, but I have no doubt those old engravings, 
those treasures of my childhood that supported the 
weight of the green casket, are equally vulnerable. 
To be sure, they have been disposed of long ago. 
Who ever mentions their very date without a snigger 
and a holding up of hands ? Yet such is the abiding 
influence of things loved in one's extreme youth, 
that, at the risk of shocking the very advanced, I 
must maintain that the early-Victorians knew a 
thing or two that an age which prides itself on its 
omniscience has been unduly eager to forget. 



LOW TASTES 



LOW TASTES 

"If we English could begin to be frank about 
our low tastes," a friend observed to me, " we could 
undermine the foundations of our national cant. 
We could discover where we really stand, and begin 
to get over our reluctance to say what we really 
think." Could we? Are the low tastes which we 
all at times indulge more real than our finer and 
more presentable appreciations? Most authors, 
through the pressure of their economic circum- 
stances, have to publish a great deal of hurried and 
inferior writing. But no one, save their personal 
enemies or the naturally mean, would think of 
trying to " place " them by anything but their 
best work. The good sense of the community 
leads it to remember the masterpiece and to forget 
the pot-boiler. The masterpiece shows the real 
man, the pot-boiler only the commonplace residuum 
of his intellect. It may be much the same with 
the average man's tastes. A love of Plato or 
Plotinus, a passion for Montaigne or Beethoven 
or Mozart or Mantegna may be an essential part of 

199 



200 REPUTATIONS 

the make-up of an individual who in loose moments 
is perfectly capable of slinking off to see " Tarzan of 
the Apes," or " The Auction of Souls." In such a 
case his worthy and avowable appreciations will be 
much more real, much more characteristic than his 
supplementary " low tastes." Thus it is arguable 
that our reluctance to talk about our low tastes 
is due, not so much to cant, as to an appreciation 
of the fact that these tastes do not really give a just 
indication of our mentality, and have no significance. 
But there is another school of thought which 
declines to divide art into high and low, human 
beings into good and bad, tastes into avowable and 
shameful. The view of these people is that the 
really civilised person ought to be sufficiently free 
from prejudices to be able to appreciate at its proper 
value everything that is good of its kind from (let 
us say) The Adventures of Arsene Lupin and the 
figure of Annette Kellermann, to Rembrandt's 
etchings and the architecture of Regent Street 
before the irruption of the Piccadilly hotel. They 
maintain that it is in the use of the word " low," as 
applied to those tastes which the man of refined 
sensibilities may share with the multitude, that 
our national cant displays itself most poisonously. 
With refreshing paganism they deny that there is 
anything low in looking at the pretty face and figure 
of a pretty girl when displayed " on the screen" 



LOW TASTES 201 

or on the musical comedy stage. They find nothing 
objectionable in those sensuously attractive films 
which rouse the censor to the use of his scissors, 
when such films are frankly intended to delight the 
male eye. (Naturally, for the use of feminine 
nudity as a bait to lure the public to a " propa- 
ganda " entertainment, no one, whether pagan or 
Christian, can attempt a defence. It disgusts 
every one save the astounding officials who have 
charge of our morals.) 

The pagan point of view, I confess, appeals to me 
because — in a world rotting with disease physical 
and mental — it seems eminently sane and healthy. 
The human body in perfection is one of the loveliest 
things known to us, and the instinct which prompts 
us to enjoy looking at it is one which Nature has 
planted in us, presumably for the wisest purposes. 
It is interesting to observe how our film censors 
allow this instinct to be catered for. Cant imposes 
what is called " morality " (!). If a u moral " is 
implicit in the story, all things are permissible. Thus 
the present state of things is brought about, a state 
of things which allows the Paul Pry instincts of the 
morbid adolescent to be indulged to the full, pro- 
vided only that the " morality film " gives a highly- 
coloured view of the dangers and the prevalence of 
syphilis. It is scarcely too much to say that the 
sex dramas of which our County Councils and similar 



202 REPUTATIONS 

bodies are willing to approve, instil into the minds of 
thousands of young people a horror of normal 
sexual intercourse — planting at the same time a 
predisposition to all abnormal and unnatural forms 
of sexual relief. Such is our " morality " — a 
morality, surely, of the madhouse ! But for the 
diseased minds of our censors of morals, which lead 
them to discriminate in favour of sexual pathology, 
the syphilis dramas which are now being " featured " 
at so many London cinemas could not exist a week. 
Neither the public nor those whose business it is 
to cater for their amusement really like them. But 
they are accepted, faute de mieux, to gratify a 
normal craving. I suppose " the pictures " must, 
in any case, be considered rather a low form of 
entertainment. For myself, on the rare occasions 
when I go to a cinema, I seldom find them low 
enough. I like bathing scenes with smiling " cuties ' ■ 
in exiguous costumes; I like masked bandits, 
sensational abductions, cowboys with revolvers, 
hairbreadth escapes, pursuits on horseback or by 
motor. In short, I like almost anything except 
" classics " and sob-stuff. To see a screen- version 
of a tolerable novel or of a play by a respectable 
dramatist would shock my sense of decency. The 
film-producers, to my mind, should leave the older 
arts severely alone. I consider Intolerance by far 
the best film-drama I can recall ; and this, I fancy, 



LOW TASTES 203 

was written specially with a view to production on 
the screen. The film version of The Vicar of Wake- 
field, on the other hand, is to me an outrage. I 
enjoy seeing Chaplin or Mary Pickford and their 
many rivals. But when the familiar features of 
some actor or actress from the " legitimate " stage 
appear before me in a cinema I have to get up and 
walk out. 

Among the most cherished of my so-called " low 
tastes " is a liking for revue and for musical 
comedy. I have never sympathised with those 
high-brow patrons of " earnest drama " who seldom 
lose an opportunity of sneering at the form of 
entertainment characteristic of Daly's, the Empire 
or the Gaiety. I suspect that intellectual snobbish- 
ness, combined with an inability to appreciate 
talent when it appears in unexpected places, lies 
at the bottom of many of their diatribes. It is 
astonishing how few people realise what a high level 
of technical efficiency is to be found even in the 
choruses of our best musical comedies. It is widely 
believed that all a musical comedy chorus-girl 
requires is a pretty face. Endowed with this, our 
art-snobs imagine that she has nothing else to do 
but just to walk on and show her teeth. Just to 
" walk on " ! I will hazard a guess that there are 
a large number of young women with foreign names 
waggling their arms and galumphing about before 



204 REPUTATIONS 

the inner art circles of London society (and hailed 
as " wonderful " by many of the critics) who 
would be denied admission to a good London chorus 
simply because of their inability to "walk " and their 
refusal to learn. There is really no public so easily 
imposed upon as the London public. Frauds 
who wish to get rich quickly without taking the 
pains necessary to enable them to learn their 
business have merely to hang round their necks 
the " art " label. In London they are accepted 
at once on their own valuation. All that is required 
of the " art " dancer is a complete absence of 
humour, an inexpensive " Greek ' costume, an 
" art " backcloth, an accompanist who knows a 
little Chopin, bare feet and a capacity to leap and 
waggle. This is their stock-in-trade : let one of 
them take it to the stage door of the Gaiety and 
see what happens. With all their chatter about 
eurythmics, have they any real sense of rhythm ? 
No. Can they walk? No. Are they in good 
physical condition? No. Have they enough 
character to submit to a long and arduous training ? 
Most certainly, no ! 

The more carefully the work of our best musical 
comedy artists is studied, I think the greater must 
be our admiration of their talent. The critics 
neglect them apparently for no better reason than 
that the public has taken them to its bosom. 



LOW TASTES 205 

When will the art of Miss Gertie Millar receive the 
serious attention which it deserves? Who has 
ever appreciated the genius of Gabrielle Ray ? Poor 
Evie Greene lived and died, immensely admired, no 
doubt, but essentially unrecognised. The truth is 
that musical comedy is one of the very few forms of 
entertainment which has been brought in London 
to its highest perfection. I was told by a connois- 
seur whom I trust that the London production of 
Oscar Strauss' operetta A Waltz Dream, with Gertie 
Millar as Mitzi, was incomparably superior to the 
original production in Vienna. And one of my 
most cherished theatrical memories is of the late 
George Edwardes' production, at Daly's, of Les 
Merveilleuses, with Evie Greene and Gabrielle 
Ray in the caste. I have never seen anything 
better than this, of its kind, on the English stage. I 
believe the secret of our success with musical 
comedy is to be found in the elaborate system of 
training through which even the despised chorus- 
girl has to pass, in the amount of sheer hard 
work which has to be put in by all who wish to 
master a peculiarly difficult technique and to reach 
the standard expected by our best producers. 

I think we ought to be as proud of our musical 
comedies as we are (or were) of our music-halls. 
The music-hall is, I suppose, no longer considered 
a " low taste," for the simple reason that a great 



206 REPUTATIONS 

critic has performed the valuable service of explaining 
to our art-snobs just how proud we ought to be of 
our English music-hall stars. Failure to appreciate 
the genius of George Robey, Vesta Tilley, Little 
Tich, Miss Marie Lloyd, is at last recognised, not as 
an indication of ultra-refined instincts, but as a 
mark of stupidity. Perhaps some critic of genius 
will arise among us and " discover " our musical 
comedy stars, in the same way. 

In confessing my love for music-halls and musical 
comedy, and my addiction to the masked bandit of 
the picture palace, I do not feel that I have run 
the risk of damning myself irreparably with my 
modest circle of readers. For these weaknesses, 
I shall, I fancy, be forgiven. But if I steel myself 
to own up to some of my vicious tastes in literature 
— then at once I am on more dangerous ground. 
I think of the fate of that unhappy man who was 
gulled into admitting that he had never read a line 
of Dickens, and shudder. Yet a confession of 
frailty which is only partial is worse than none at 
all. Now that I have got so far I must go through 
with it. So I will own that there are times when 
Dr. Fu-Manchu is more to me than all the works 
of Shakespeare or of Mr. Shaw, moments when the 
exploits of Arsene Lupin or of Dr. Thorndyke thrill 
me more deeply than Claudel or Mr. Yeats. Such 
moments, it is only fair to add, are usually late at 



LOW TASTES 207 

night, when I ought to be fast asleep after having 
assimilated my daily chapter of the Bible. Alas, I 
have never acquired the habit of reading good books 
before I go to sleep ! Once in bed my taste in 
literature collapses, and only the most lurid 
examples of detective fiction will do. (In this vice 
I have been able to discover no associates. Even 
Mr. H. M. Tomlinson, a most companionable writer, 
boasts of a dreadfully improving bedroom library.) 
The only way I can redress the balance is by 
affirming that the tastes I display in another 
apartment (which I will not specify) reach the 
utmost limits of refinement, and embrace even the 
Georgians! But on the whole, when I think of 
my reading during the past ten years, I am put to 
shame. My good intentions are undoubted. 
Whenever I find myself in the neighbourhood of 
the Charing Cross Road I am drawn irresistibly 
to the bookshops. I finger all the English Classics 
which I have never read, and rarely come away 
without purchasing some work without which no 
gentleman's library is complete. I carry home my 
volume in triumph, with a pleasant anticipatory 
thrill. Do I read it? Never. As there is no 
room on my shelves the new-comers go into a 
cupboard or on to the floor, and there they remain. 
I admit, reluctantly, that I am a " cover collector." 
And if I cannot read the Classics which I failed to 



208 REPUTATIONS 

assimilate in my youth, I am very nearly as bad 
over those modern masterpieces which the fashion- 
able critics never tire of acclaiming with loud yawps. 
I buy Proust, Claudel, Peguy; and for the hun- 
dredth time I find myself reading Merimee instead. 
For ten years now I have been preaching Merimee 
in London to unheeding ears. Nobody listens to 
me. Very well, I will enjoy him all to myself. 
The older I get the harder I find it to read the books 
I ought to read, and the more closely do I cling to 
those I want to read, most of which I have read 
many times before. Give me Merimee, Turgenev, 
Flaubert, Christina Rossetti, Vanity Fair, and half 
a dozen travel books about South and Central 
America or the Islands of the Pacific and I am happy 
for a week. Turgenev is, I think, the only writer 
whose complete works are necessary to my well- 
being. Of his writings I would not be without one 
line. Dostoieffsky I can appreciate by an effort of 
will, but I have read only The Idiot and The Brothers 
Karamazov. I have collected the covers of some 
of the others, but they are very dusty. I know I 
shall never open them. 

Of books about South America, however badly 
written, I do not think I could ever tire. When I 
get to Rio de Janeiro, or start on a voyage up the 
River Plate, I settle myself in my chair for the even- 
ing. I know much more about the history of Para- 



LOW TASTES 209 

guay than about the history of Rome. And if Mr. 
Lloyd-George, when he is improvising his next 
treaty, ever wants to know where Bogota is, like 
Agatha, I can find it for him instantly on my map. 
As for the Amazon, I know it backwards — I have 
been there with H. M. Tomlinson, Russell Wallace, 
Paul Fountain, W. H. G. Kingston and a score of 
others. Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chili are equally 
familiar. And if any one wants to know what, 
to my mind, is the finest short story in the English 
language I will tell him. It is El Ombu, by 
W. H. Hudson. 

I realise that by now I have given myself away 
hopelessly. I have burnt my boats. I shall never 
gain admittance to the inner circles of the highbrows. 
I shall never shine at a Hampstead tea-party. (In- 
deed I do honestly prefer the conversation I can 
overhear in the saloon bars of obscure pubs on 
Sunday evenings.) As an " intellectual " I am, as 
some of my homely friends would describe it, " a 
bloody wash-out." But, if I believe in anything at 
all in this world, I believe in freedom of thought 
and in the possibilities which present themselves 
in an alliance of those who, being free, yet think 
alike. I have confessed my low tastes ; but I am 
unrepentant — because at least they are my own. 



LOOKING BACK 



LOOKING BACK 

No writer, I imagine, ever forgets the first guinea 
earned by his pen, or the moment when he first 
saw his name in print appended to his contribution. 
In my case the guinea arrived in 1905, when I was 
a boy of seventeen, reading for Smalls in a country 
vicarage in Somerset. I had contributed a copy 
of verses to The Academy, then controlled by 
Mr. P. Anderson Graham, the editor of Country 
Life, and not only did I receive a guinea, but also 
an invitation to a banquet at the Dieudonne, given 
to celebrate The Academy's rebirth. I did not go 
to the banquet, but my excitement at receiving the 
invitation was enormous, and the number of poems 
I produced under the spur of this encouragement 
was colossal ! 

My University career was short and sweet. 

Faced with the necessity of earning a living some 

years sooner than I had anticipated, it was again 

Mr. Anderson Graham — this time in his capacity 

as editor of Country Life — who gave me my chance. 

I shall never forget our first interview. I arrived 

213 



214 REPUTATIONS 

shaking with shyness, and in reply to his question 
as to what my literary ambitions were, I murmured, 
with blushful sincerity, that I wanted to be a poet ! 
This answer must have been irresistible, for I found 
myself engaged on the spot, not, of course, to write 
verses, but to learn the severe and solemn trade 
of sub-editing. The years I spent on the staff of 
Country Life were perhaps the most useful appren- 
ticeship I could have served. I discovered, quickly 
enough, that to earn a living by the pen is by no 
means all raptures and roses, lit by purple spots of 
inspiration. I learnt what hard work meant, and 
if I had paid more attention to Mr. Graham's salu- 
tary criticism I might have picked up the elements 
of a prose style. For Mr. Anderson Graham is 
that now rare thing, an editor with a genuine 
love of letters and a genuine interest in young men 
whose ambition it is to write. If he had troubled 
to put into practice those principles of writing clear, 
straightforward and compact English, which he 
knew so well how to inculcate, he would surely have 
been an essayist, and perhaps a novelist of high 
rank. His great loves in literature, when I was on 
his staff — and I don't suppose they have changed 
— were Tennyson and Walter Scott. (He used to 
tell me that Wandering Willie's tale was the best 
short story in our language.) Swinburne he regarded 
as a " minor poet," an opinion which shocked me 



LOOKING BACK 215 

profoundly in those days, though I have since come 
to endorse it. Mr. Graham is an editor of the old 
school. His great bulk, his enormous dented 
bowler, big, boyish face, tanned and wrinkled by 
exposure to all weathers, his tiny, acute eyes, his 
slow, rolling walk, are unforgettable. He is a John- 
sonian figure, a survival from a vanished Bohemia. 
Long may he continue to carry on — in his ample 
person — the great tradition ! 

It was while I was reading the proofs of Mr. 
Graham's articles for Country Life, and writing 
innumerable little poems at odd moments, that he 
introduced me to Ford Madox Hueffer, who was at 
that time contemplating his English Review. Mr. 
Hueffer engaged me to act as the sub-editor of the 
new venture in my spare time, and my happiness 
was complete. In those days my capacities for 
hero-worship were prodigious. Contact with the 
really great names in our literature filled me with 
humility and awe. The life of the artist (was I 
not myself a poet who had earned a guinea ?) seemed 
the most glorious adventure conceivable. I had 
never at that time encountered a u . business man " ; 
for commerce and money-making I had a supreme 
contempt. All that kind of thing belonged to 
worlds which I had never explored and did not 
want to explore. I never heard anything about 
them at school or at Oxford, certainly not among 



216 REPUTATIONS 

my mother's friends, who were exclusively religious, 
and ranged from the then Bishop of Ripon (Dr. 
Boyd Carpenter) at the head, to the youngest local 
curate. Religion, which in its orthodox forms I 
loathed, art and letters, which I loved, were the 
two soils in which I had been nurtured, so that my 
translation to Ford Madox Hueffer's review was 
like a translation to Heaven. Whatever else it was — 
and I still think it was one of the most brilliant 
editorial adventures in our literary history — 
Hueffer's review was certainly not commercial. 

My first duty under my new chief was to 
accompany him on a week-end visit to Joseph 
Conrad, who was then living in a farmhouse near 
Luton in Bedfordshire. Hueffer was curiously 
mediaeval in those days. He was the last of the 
Barons, travelling with his retinue. I was the 
retinue. My role was to be silent, attentive, 
respectful and obedient ; and I believe I played it 
to perfection. It was a dripping wet winter evening 
when we arrived at Luton. Editor and " retinue " 
got into a stuffy fly, which very slowly splashed its 
way along the country lanes to Conrad's door. The 
house was surrounded by trees and seemed unutter- 
ably melancholy, ghost-haunted and eerie. The 
rooms were dim and candle-lit. Conrad, as I 
remember him, was a broad-shouldered, stooping 
man, with bright brown eyes and very charming 



LOOKING BACK 217 

manners ; and he talked a queer exciting mixture 
of French and English. After dinner we went to 
his study on the first floor. I hid on a sofa while 
my host and my employer talked to one another 
endlessly about Flaubert's technique, about Emma 
Bovary's drive through Rouen with her lover, 
about the marvellous closing paragraphs of Un 
Cceur Simple. The perfection of that wonderful 
conte, then first revealed to me, has been a joy ever 
since. The life which Flaubert led in his hermitage 
on the banks of the Seine, when, with prodigious 
energy and patience, he built up his masterpieces, 
was surely the life of a saint — one of the most 
romantic lives of which we know the details. I 
felt it first that evening. Conrad talked eagerly, 
with many shrugs and gesticulations, and for hours 
I sat listening to Hueffer's high, querulous drawl 
blending with his deeper, more staccato notes. 

The English Review was edited in a flat over a 
poulterer's shop in Holland Park Avenue. Some- 
times gobbets of blood, oozing from the suspended 
carcases of rabbits, made the threshold positively 
unsafe. But it was a delightful flat when you 
reached it, though as an editorial sanctum it always 
struck me as being slightly eccentric. Hueffer 
also, it must be admitted, was a slightly eccentric 
editor. When I arrived, after my day's work on 
Country Life, I was usually dispatched to the 



218 REPUTATIONS 

Shepherd's Bush Empire to secure a box or two 
stalls for the " second house." Here we used to 
repair, evening after evening, with the manuscripts 
which had accumulated during the day. Hueffer 
would hold the manuscripts on his lap, and while the 
jugglers hurled golden bottles at one another with 
prodigious violence he would dictate his letters and 
decide their fate. But the moment Victoria Monks, 
or some one of the kind, made her appearance, 
then the cares of editing were at once forgotten. 
The manuscripts slipped unheeded to the floor 
and we both enjoyed ourselves. So far as I can 
recall, at least the first five or six numbers of The 
English Review were edited from the Shepherd's 
Bush Empire. That they were none the worse 
for it, those who possess file copies can see for 
themselves. 

The flat seemed always full of people. I 
remember particularly the merciless practical jokes 
of Mr. Percival Gibbon, and Mr. Scott-James' 
sombre benevolence. Then there was the specta- 
cular figure of Mr. Cunninghame Graham (whose 
illegible handwriting I had to try to decipher), 
Mr. W. H. Hudson, tall, white-haired, black-eyed 
and silent-footed, Violet Hunt, Edward Thomas, 
Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Stephen Reynolds, 
Edward Garnett, Edgar Jepson, and a host of 
others whose names I cannot recall. Thomas 



LOOKING BACK 219 

Hardy I once saw in those rooms — a little, quiet, 
grey man wearing a red tie, who discussed in a 
weary voice the ailments of his younger relatives, 
while all round him the latest lion-cubs pranced 
and roared. 

Conrad was there fairly often in the first months 
of our existence. I remember one occasion when 
he enraged me so frightfully that I seriously thought 
of challenging him to a duel. He was discussing 
with Hueffer some new book on which he was 
engaged. It was a very technical conversation, 
writers' shop, and not particularly interesting. 
But at intervals of about three minutes Conrad 
would turn to me and say, " Now, Goldring, you 
must remember this is strictly confidential. I 
know what journalists are ! No paragraphs, please ! " 
I got a riper and riper scarlet, till I nearly burst. 
If there was one thing in those days of which I 
had no doubts whatever it was that I was a creative 
artist. A journalist indeed ! A pedlar of literary 
gossip to halfpenny newspapers ! I can tell you, 
it was bitter. Conrad, I am sure, had not the 
faintest notion how deeply he was insulting the 
callow youth who sat and glowered at him ! 

Among the many amusing experiences of those 
days I remember particularly a visit to The Pines 
at Putney. It was in May 1909, about a month 
after Swinburne's death, and the object of my call 



220 REPUTATIONS 

was to negotiate with Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton 
for one of Swinburne's posthumous MSS., an article 
on the plays of Francis Beaumont. 

After my arrival at the house I was left to cool 
my heels for about fifteen minutes in a very pleasant, 
but — as it seemed to me — rather commonplace 
drawing-room, in which a few pictures by Rossetti 
and by some of the lesser pre-Raphaelites were the 
principal indications of the house's special character. 
At last the door opened and a little shambling 
figure came in to greet me. It was Watts-Dunton. 
He seemed to be about four feet high. He was 
dressed in a long, shiny, black frock-coat, and wore 
white woollen socks. He had on black spectacles, 
and his white hair was long and unkempt. He 
came towards me across the room with both his little 
arms outstretched, caught my hand (as if by a lucky 
shot), after several unsuccessful efforts, and shook it 
quickly up and down. But in spite of his queer 
appearance I remember being immensely impressed. 
Watts-Dunton had undoubtedly the manner and 
bearing of a "personage." Nowadays I notice 
many attempts to achieve this manner, both among 
my contemporaries and among the leading men of 
the generation before me; but I can think of no 
instance in which the effort can really be called a 
success. The Victorians must have had a certain 
style about them. Modern conditions perhaps 



LOOKING BACK 221 

prevent its recapture. Nowadays, as far as my 
own experience goes, almost the only writers who 
really have a " presence " are the Dublin poets 
and journalists. 

We discussed (at rather tedious length) the merits 
of Swinburne's poetry. Watts-Dunton claimed 
that Swinburne had not yet received his due as 
one of the greatest nature poets in the whole range 
of English literature. He was writing a book, he 
said, to prove it. Then we talked of the merits 
of the article I had come to buy, and finally we got 
down to hard business. I found Mr. Watts-Dunton 
a keen bargainer, and it was soon evident that on 
one side of his character he was an astute and 
highly capable man of business. We tussled amic- 
ably over the price to be paid for the " American 
Rights," and I remember that his lowest offer was 
exactly ten pounds more than the highest price 
which I was authorised to bid. 

Before getting up to go, acting under advice, I 
made some halting references to Aylwin, a book 
which to this day I must confess I have never read. 
(At a safe distance I am prepared to admire it 
immensely.) No sooner had I blurted out my 
little compliment than the old gentleman scrambled 
to his feet and made me the most charmingly 
ceremonious bow. So I hastily got up from my 
arm-chair and returned it, with as much grace 



222 REPUTATIONS 

as I could muster. Youth and age saluting one 
another ! 

Aylwin was evidently a favourite topic of 
conversation with its author. In measured, rather 
guttural tones he expatiated on the prodigious 
success it had attained, attributing this success to 
the exciting nature of the story. He recounted 
endless anecdotes about Victorian heroes who had 
sat up all night to finish it, unable to lay it down. 
From the financial standpoint he regretted bitterly 
having allowed it to appear in " The World's 
Classics." 

The discussion of Aylwin had the effect of 
loosening his tongue, and he settled himself in his 
chair and discoursed to me for a full hour on literary 
matters. Referring to Country Life — I told him 
that I was connected with that paper — he remarked, 
"It is a most beautiful publication. All of it is 
charming, even the advertisements ! " He spoke 
also of Mr. Anderson Graham's novel The Red 
Scaur, of which he had the highest opinion. By 
some accident the long review of it which he wrote 
for The Athenceum was not inserted. To this 
misadventure he was inclined to attribute the fact 
that the book had not a larger sale. I was charged 
to convey an urgent message to Mr. Graham, 
begging him to write another novel of " country 
manners and pursuits." 



LOOKING BACK 223 

Returning to the subject of Swinburne, he 
described him as the last of the old generation of 
poets and the first of the new. " Speaking now, 
a month after his death, I tell you that this country 
has yet to appreciate him fully. The time will 
come when he will be still more highly thought of 
even than he is to-day." He mentioned " Hertha " 
as being an example of a type of nature poem 
w r hich future generations would appreciate enor- 
mously. His view of Swinburne seemed to be that 
he was a poet in advance of his time. He seemed 
genuinely surprised at the tributes made to Swin- 
burne in the Press. " I had no idea he was held 
in such respect and veneration." He added, as I 
got up to go, that Swinburne's death would 
immensely increase his " sales," and thus the market 
value of his copyrights ! I went off wondering 
whether, after all, Hueffer would rise to that 
extra ten pounds. 

Some months later, when I published my first 
little book of poems (now happily forgotten), I sent 
a copy to Mr. Watts-Dunton, and received a very 
flattering letter in reply, which contained an 
invitation to me to go again to see him at The 
Pines. But for some reason or another I never 
went, nor did it ever occur to me to advertise his 
favourable comments at the head of my reviews. 
Looking back I am astonished at my own naivete, 



224 REPUTATIONS 

at my juvenile fine feelings ! Not only Watts- 
Dunton, but even Mr. Joseph Conrad, and several 
other eminent literary personages, wrote me flatter- 
ing letters about that " little brochure," as one of 
them described it. If they would only do the 
same thing again, I feel sure that my enterprising 
publishers on both sides of the Atlantic would 
" wireless " their encomiums up and down the 
world within a few hours. Can't you imagine it ? 
" Eminent English novelist says Douglas Goldring's 
poems show extraordinary promise and remarkable 
powers of expressing deep emotion in simple and 
beautiful language." Well, we live and learn — too 
late. 

Stephen Reynolds was for a time a constant 
visitor at the flat in Holland Park Avenue. He 
was a very lovable man, but I have rarely detested 
any book as much as I detested his novel The 
Holy Mountain, of which it was my duty to read 
the proofs. My hatred of this story became a 
standing joke. It has persisted to this day, and 
I still think that Reynolds was that rather rare 
thing among writers, a greater man than his 
works. 

In the course of my sub- editorial duties it often 
fell to me to run about London calling on con- 
tributors. Bernard Shaw was one of the people 
on whom I had to wait. I cannot now remember 



LOOKING BACK 225 

what it was I had to see him about, but I have a 
vivid recollection of his beginning the conversation 
on the landing of the floor above, while I was sitting 
in his dining-room. He rushed in, in the middle 
of one sentence and rushed out before the end of 
another. 

Mr. Max Beerbohm was a particularly agreeable 
celebrity to call on in this way. He talked on 
every subject under the sun except the business 
in hand, and made me ill with laughing. As I 
had always been a great admirer of his works, 
it was delightful to find him as amusing and 
as "nice" as one could possibly have expected. 
Those were days when affectation among literary 
men was carried perhaps to a higher pitch even 
than now. But the great Max, as I remember 
him, was absolutely unaffected, natural and 
charming. 

Looking back eleven years, the temptation to 
belaud a past epoch is strong upon me. And yet 
I cannot be sure whether it is I who have changed 
or the atmosphere of literary London. To me, in 
those days, it seemed that men really did care for 
literature for its own sake. A man would take a 
pride in praising his enemy's book. And it was a 
saying (I think of Hueffer's) that " one doesn't crab 
another fellow's benefit." A generous attitude, 
that. Is it fashionable to-day? I hardly think 
Q 



226 REPUTATIONS 

so. And looking back it seems to me that in those 
days there was more than a show of critical detach- 
ment among the men who took criticism seriously — 
that there was, indeed, more serious criticism. The 
aspirant to literary fame did not attack Society 
first, and produce the goods only after he had made 
elaborate preparations for their reception. On the 
contrary, there were genuine discoveries, and the 
discoverers were disinterested. Were they? Or 
do I only imagine all these things? Did I give 
credit where none was due, out of ignorance ? And 
do I only think that the English world of letters 
has now deteriorated because I know it is so much 
better? I give it up. Youth covers everything 
it sees with something of its own romanticism. 
Perhaps one's eyesight at twenty is not trust- 
worthy, and perhaps young men — at least in 
pre-war days — were too apt to credit their elders 
with possessing their own unspoiled idealism. But 
of some things one can be certain at any age, even 
at twenty. Kindness at least is always recognis- 
able. My memories of ten years back are in this 
respect uniformly happy. No young nobody from 
nowhere could have been treated more generously 
by his elders than I was. I hope the experiences 
of those who are beginning their writing life in 1920 
are equally pleasant. But perhaps the boot is now 
on the other leg. Youth has come into its own, and 



LOOKING BACK 227 

(quite rightly) will " thank you for nothing." It is 
the middle-aged who are now in need of encourage- 
ment and help, at the hands of their juniors. They 
rarely get it; and more rarely still do they 
deserve it. 



INDEX 



Academy, The, 9, 10, 12, 213 
Mneid, The, 18, 19 
Akenside, Mark, 185 
Anderson Graham, Mr. P., 213, 

214, 222 
Angell, Norman, 85 
Arsene Lupin, The Adventures 

of, 200, 206 
Athenceum, The, 222 
Aylmn, 221, 222 

Barbusse, Henri, 94, 106 
Barker, Granville, 15, 16 
Battaille, 17 

Beaverbrook, Lord, 151 
Beerbohm, Max, 225 
Beethoven, 199 
Belloc, Hilaire, 85 
Bennett, Arnold, 43, 70, 85, 

147-156 
Blackwell, 42 
Blast, 135 

Bouvard et Pecuchet, 141 
Bridge of Fire, TJie, 9, 29, 31 
Bridges, Robert, 112 
Brooke, Rupert, 96, 101 
Browning, Robert, 185 
Burke, Thomas, 180 
Butler, Samuel, 59 
Byron, Lord, 119, 185, 187, 

193, 195 

Cafe Royal, The, 138, 139 
Carman, Gilbert, 39, 59-63, 
85, 177 



Carlyle, Thomas, 185 

Carnival, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46 

Cezanne, 187 

Chaplin, Charles, 203 

Chesterton, G. K., 85 

Clarte, 94 

Claudel, Paul, 206, 208 

Clayhanger, 153 

Conrad, Joseph, 173, 216, 217, 

219, 224 
Corelli, Miss Marie, 180 
Country Life, 213, 214, 215, 

217, 222 

Dane, Miss Clemence, 172, 173, 

174 
Davies, W. H., 118 
de la Mare, Walter, 112, 113, 

117, 118, 119 
Dell, Miss Ethel M., 180 
Dent, Messrs. J. M., 11 
Dickens, Charles, 206 
Don Quixote, 57 
Dostoievsky, 176, 208 
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 9 
Drinkwater, John, 108 
Duchess of Wrexe, The, 54 
Duhamel, 106 

Edwardes, George, 205 
Egoist, The, 136 
Eliot, T. S., 119 
El Ombu, 209 

English Review, The, 72, 136, 
144, 215, 217, 218 



229 



230 



INDEX 



Evans, Caradoc, 180 
Evening News, The, 143 
Everybody's Husband, 60 
Everyman, 17 

Farrere, Claude, 17 
First Love, 46 
Fitzgerald, Edward, 19 
Flaubert, Gustave, 141, 153, 

208, 217 
Flecker, James Elroy, 1-35 
Fort, Paul, 13 
Fortnightly Review, The, 13 
Forty-two Poems, 11, 13, 30, 31 
Fountain, Paul, 209 
Frankau, Gilbert, 111 
Fu-Manchu, Dr., 206 

Galsworthy, John, 85 

Garnett, Edward, 218 

Gauguin, 187 

Gautier, Theophile, 179 

George, W. L., 85 

Gibbon, Percival, 218 

Gibbs, Philip, 106 

Gissing, George, 125-132 

God, the Invisible King, 96 

Gogh, Van, 187 

Golden Journey to Samarkand, 

The, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 

19, 22, 30, 31, 33 
Goschen, Max, 11, 14, 15, 17, 21 
Graham, Stephen, 56 
Graves, Robert, 105, 119 
Grecians, The, 26 
Green Mirror, The, 54 
Greene, Evie, 205 
Guy and Pauline, 49, 50 

Hardy, Thomas, 112, 154, 173 
Hassan, 15, 16, 18, 21, 23 
Hichens, Robert, 180 
Hilda Lessways, 153 
Houseman, A. E., 116 



Hudson, Stephen, 178. 218 

Hudson, W. H., 209 

Hueffer, 113, 114, 115, 116, 

117, 135,215,223 
Hugo, Victor, 20, 94 
Hunt, Violet, 218 

// All These Young Men, 175, 

177 
Inquest on Pierrot, 60 

James, Henry, 40, 52 
Jean Cristophe, 60 
Jepson, Edgar, 218 
Joan and Peter, 93 
John, Augustus, 187 
Joyce, James, 143 

King of Alsander, The, 6, 14, 

15 21 25 
Kingston, W. H. G., 209 
Kipling, Rudyard, 29, 112, 

114, 195 

Lanterne, 17 

Last Generation, The, 25 
Latzko, Andreas, 106 
Lawrence, D. H., 27, 46, 63, 

67-78,112,113,119,143,173 
Ledwidge, Francis, 118 
Lee, Vernon, 85 
Legend, 172 
Lewis, Wyndham, 135-144. 

187, 218 
Little Review, The, 144 
Lloyd, Marie, 206 
Look, We Have Gome 

Through! 72,73, 113 
Lover, Samuel, 185 

MacGill, Patrick, 106 
Mackenzie, Compton, 39-51, 

59, 62, 63 
Mail, Daily, TJie, 95 



INDEX 



231 



Mantegna, 199 
Martin Schuller, 176 
Masefield, John, 60, 112, 195 
Matador of the Five Towns, 

The, 152, 156 
Mathews, Elkin, 6 
Mendel, 62 

Merimee, Prosper, 179, 208 
Michael and Sylvia, 50 
Miles Dixon, 60 
Millar, Gertie, 205 
Milner, Lord, 57 
Montaigne, 199 
Morel, E. D., 85 
Morning Post, The, 17 
Motley, 113 
Mozart, 199 

Mr. Britling Sees it Through, 92 
Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, 58 
Mr. Polly, 21 
Mummery, 60 
Murray, Gilbert, 22 
Murry, J. Middleton, 175, 176, 

179 
Muse in Arms, The, 101 
Musset, Alfred de, 20 

Nan, 60 

Nation, The, 16 

New Grub Street, 125, 126 

New Statesman, The, 17 

Nichols, Robert, 110, 111 

Nietzsche, 143 

Noel, 60 

Northcliffe, Lord, 87, 92, 112 

Old Mole, 62 

Old Wives' Tale, The, 153. 156 

Omar Khayyam, 19 

On Heaven, 113 

Passionate Elopement, The, 42 
Philippe, Charles Louis, 137 
Phillpotts, Eden, 154 



Pickford, Mary, 203 
Pink Eoses, 60 
Plato, 199 
Plotinus, 199 
Poetry Review, The, 104 
Pole, The, 135 
Poor Relations, 50 
Pound, Ezra, 218 
Pretty Lady, The, 154-155 
Private Papers of Henry Rye- 
croft, The, 131 

Rainbow, The, 70, 71 
Ray, Gabrielle, 205 
Redding, Cyrus, 159-168 
Renard, Jules, 17 
Return of the Soldier, TJie, 180 
Reynolds, Stephen, 218, 224 
Richard Kurt, 178 
Robey, George, 206 
Rolland, Romain, 60 
Roll Gall, The, 156 
Romains, Jules, 137 
Rossetti, Christina, 208 
Round the Corner, 62 
Russell, Bertrand, 85, 91 

Sassoon, Siegfried, 105, 106, 

107, 108, 109, 119 
Scholar's Italian Book, 25 
Scott-James, R. A., 218 
Scott, Walter, 214 
Seeker, Martin, 39 
Secret City, The, 56, 57 
Seeger, Alan, 105 
Shakespeare, 206 
Sharp, Evelyn, 85 
Shaw, Bernard, 19, 85, 88, 91 

206, 224 
Shelley, Percy, 119 
Sinister Street, 41, 46, 48, 49 
Sitwell, Osbert, 105, 109 
Skiadaressi, Mile. Helle (Mrs. 

James Elroy Flecker), 11 



232 



INDEX 



" Solomon Eagle," 17 
Sons and Lovers, 46, 71 
Sorley, Wilfred, 105 
Soul of a Bishop, The, 92 
Spectator, The, 16, 17, 115 
Squire, J. C, 1, 85 
Still Life, 175, 176 
Strauss, Oscar, 205 
Stucco House, The, 62 
Swinburne, 214, 219, 220, 221, 

223 
Swinnerton, Frank, 132 
Sylvia Scarlett, 50 
Symons, Arthur, 32 

Tarr, 136, 137, 144 
"Tarzan of the Apes," 51 
Tatler, The, 176 
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 29, 

185, 214 
Thirty -six Poems, 11 
Thomas, Edward, 218 
Thorndyke, Dr., 206 
Three Pretty Men, 62 
Tich, Little, 206 
Tilley, Vesta, 206 
Time and Eternity, 60, 61 
Times, The, 17, 95 
Tomlinson, H. M„ 207, 209 



Torrents of Spring, The, 46 
Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 

50 
Trespasser, The, 78 
Trollope, Anthony, 147 
Turgenev, Ivan, 46, 208 
Twilight in Italy, 72 

Un Coeur Simple, 217 

Vanity Fair, 208 
Virgil, 18, 19, 22, 23 

Wallace, Russell, 209 
Walpole, Hugh; 39, 52-58, 59, 

62,63 
Watson, William, 111 
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 22), 

221, 222, 223 
Waugh, Alec, 180 
Wells, H. G., 21 ; 81-98, 173 
West, Rebecca, 180 
White Peacock, The, 70 
Wilson, President, 88 
Wilson, Romer, 175, 176, 179 
Windmills, 59 
World Set Free, The, 89 

Yeats, W. B., 206 



